I work at a school and due to this we may have thousands of students who will sit at different PCs each day. We use Deepfreeze which some may be familiar with. It locks the machine and doesn't allow changes. This works good for us because we don't need to worry about viruses or malware. Just reboot the machine and it's back to the original image. The problem is when a new user logs in because it doesn't save this information after it's shutdown. Each user is basically a new user. With Windows 7 this wasn't really a problem because it would create them as a user on the local machine with a minute or so.
With windows 8.1 I have done the following testing and it seems abysmal. With a standard install on the domain etc, a local user can login from the login screen in 7.6 seconds. This is very good and expected as the users account already exists. Next a user who does not exist takes a whopping 3:30 seconds to go from entering their password and hitting enter to the start screen. This is because it's creating all these useless apps etc for a new users. I did some investigation and found that we could remove apps and the packages. I used a script I found which removed about 80% without any manual editing. I verified that on the administrator account pretty much only skydrive, camera, and one more were left. I then logged in again with a user account which was not already existing. This time it took more time? a whopping 4:33 seconds. I found that all the apps were back on the newly created user. So either something went wrong or this is some new behavior of 8.1? I really don't want any apps and just need the user to be able to be created a logged in quickly. Even two minutes would not be bad, but 3-5 minutes from entering your password to the start screen is simply unacceptable. Does anyone know how this can be better managed? I don't believe roaming profiles would be a good answer when we have hundreds of students logging in and out of the computers on less than a hourly basis.
I'm looking to have zero apps installed for users, to speed up the creation of new users and in general better be able to manage Win 8.1 via GP. When I take into account the boot time to get to the login it's over 5-6 minutes for a new user to login to able to actually use Win 8.1. Suggestions?