To solve some problems you need to place one foot outside the box.

We have a number of kiosk machines that are networked wirelessly. Each machine is configured with automatic logon so that things return to normal after power is restored after an outage. The problem is that the wireless switch takes a long time to recover from a power failure, so when the kiosk machines try to log on, they can’t. We have to go around to all the machines and manually log them on after waiting a few minutes for the switch to get itself back up. Is there a way we can delay the automatic logon or convince automatic logon to pause and retry?

Your first reaction may be to write a custom logon provider or otherwise control the GINA. But there’s a much lower-tech solution.

Go to your boot.ini file (or if you’re using Windows Vista, use bcdedit) to increase the boot menu timeout. The timeout value in boot.ini can go as high as 11 million seconds (about four months). If your wireless switch takes more than four months to get itself into a ready state, then you’ve got worse problems.