Slow logins when mapping printers

[terrywilson]

Our login script is a kix script that uses the con2prt tool to map to a remote print server. We used to have our print server on site so we never noticed a performance hit; we have now moved the print server to another site and have found that at login time when we use con2prt it now takes about 30s to connect to the printer.

I have tried using other ways to connect to the printer; the native kix addprinterconnection command, the printui dll and a few other tools so it would appear that the delay isnt a limitation of just kix. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can work around this? I was wondering if I could start a process in the background that starts mapping the printers while the user is able to login and continues using their PC?

We have over 150 printers; I dont want to use Group Policy because I think that having to create a huge amount of OU's to manage this would be very clunky and not an elegant solution. I also would like to keep using Kix as the technicians know and understand it. I have considered looking at other tools like Desktop Authority etc; this may be a long term solution but short term I need a fix that I can implement company wide (current solution is to not map printers; not quite ideal as it catches us out when users move around etc).

 

[Popsea]

I'm curious to the answer to this question as well. I'm looking into scripting a Direct IP printer instance on each computer based off the client's IP. Mainly to avoid spooling print jobs over the WAN.