group policy preferences causing memory leak in winlogon

After i configured group policy preferences to be applied on my domain
controllers, the virtual memory used by the console instance of winlogon.exe
started to grow hundreds of megabytes a day.

From what I can tell by Watching the winlogon process with SysInternals
Process Explorer, it appears that preference application causes thread
handles used for preference processing to be leaked. Also, UDMH shows huge
allocations for call stacks like

ntdll!RtlAllocateHeapSlowly+00000041
ntdll!RtlAllocateHeap+00000E9F
kernel32!LocalAlloc+00000058
SHLWAPI!CMemStream::GrowBuffer+0000002C
SHLWAPI!CreateMemStreamEx+00000057
SHLWAPI!SHCreateMemStream+00000012
gpprefcl!DllUnregisterServer+0005C0A9
(...)
gpprefcl!DllUnregisterServer+0003C4E4
kernel32!BaseThreadStart+00000034

The same problem also happens on member servers, in direct proportion to the
freqÃ¼ency of policy refresh, and forced me to use group policy to disable
reapplication of preferences when there are no changes to the GPOs.

Is there a solution to this?

Thanks,

Marcelo Estriga.

Howdie!

Not heard of that, yet. Is that only for your servers - not the clients?
It appeared after installing the Client Side Extensions, right?

I'd open a case with PSS here.

cheers,

Florian
--
Microsoft MVP - Group Policy
eMail: prename [at] frickelsoft [dot] net.
blog: http://www.frickelsoft.net/blog.
Maillist (german): http://frickelsoft.net/cms/index.php?page=mailingliste

I made the test on Windows 2003 servers and Windows XP clients on both of my
domains, and the leak was there, as long as the Group Policy Preferences CSE
was installed and any preference item was configured to be applied to the
machine. Did't seem to affect Vista, though.

I'll try PSS When I have some time.

Cheers!

Marcelo,

Drop me a mail if you care to get this solved. I'd notify the Product
Group that there may be an issue if they didn't know already. They could
ping if by time and ask you the relevant questions to track that further
down.

cheers,

Florian
--
Microsoft MVP - Group Policy
eMail: prename [at] frickelsoft [dot] net.
blog: http://www.frickelsoft.net/blog.
Maillist (german): http://frickelsoft.net/cms/index.php?page=mailingliste

We've started seeing this recently, too. But, we don't know what change
triggered it.

Any solutions or work-arounds are very welcome.

--
Regards.
Mark K Vallevand Mark.Vallevand@Unisys.com

Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
- Benjamin Franklin

THIS COMMUNICATION MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL AND/OR OTHERWISE PROPRIETARY
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Mark,

I have talked to the Product Group about this. It appears that it is a
known issue and is fixed for the versions of GP Preference in Windows 7
and Server 2008 R2. Since they're busy getting 7 done, there's no fix
for current OSs planned. They promised to get the technical details of
the bug so we could work on a workaround but that didn't happen as of yet.

Cheers,
Florian
--
Microsoft MVP - Group Policy
eMail: prename [at] frickelsoft [dot] net.
blog: http://www.frickelsoft.net/blog.
Maillist (german): http://frickelsoft.net/cms/index.php?page=mailingliste

Thanks for the update.

Technical details are important to us, too. We need a work-around. We've
only seen this problem in out labs, but if it starts happening to any of our
customers, we're in serious trouble.

Is there a trouble report or any identifier that we can reference? I've
suggested to my management that we contact Microsoft about this problem.
Referring to an existing issue might save time.

--
Regards.
Mark K Vallevand Mark.Vallevand@Unisys.com

Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
- Benjamin Franklin

THIS COMMUNICATION MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL AND/OR OTHERWISE PROPRIETARY
MATERIAL and is thus for use only by the intended recipient. If you received
this in error, please contact the sender and delete the e-mail and its
attachments from all computers.

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3 30th October 14:38 marcelo estriga1ªÜzz²Úâ§b±Ë¬²*²hœ®‹(~×( External User Posts: 1	group policy preferences causing memory leak in winlogon I made the test on Windows 2003 servers and Windows XP clients on both of my domains, and the leak was there, as long as the Group Policy Preferences CSE was installed and any preference item was configured to be applied to the machine. Did't seem to affect Vista, though. I'll try PSS When I have some time. Cheers!