Yesterday, I continued with the application of Group Policy Objects (GPO) for our workstation (desktop and laptop) users. When running gpupdate /force for a particular user, whose desktop is running Windows XP, I noticed that the GPO wasn’t being applied.

Part of my troubleshooting was to determine if the user’s desktop could access the \\domain.com\SYSVOL directory. On this particular machine it could be accessed using \\domain\SYSVOL but not with \\domain.com\SYSVOL. In other words, appending the top level domain (TLD) revealed a name resolution failure.

The solution was to start the DNS Client, Netlogon and TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper services and configure their startup type to automatic (I will need to troubleshoot the determine the root cause of the services not running).

Enjoy!