Very Slow Intranet Web Site

[Brian Russell]

We have an intranet application that uses Windows authentication and
groups on that server to define roles in the application. After
copying code changes to the testing server I discovered that the pages
were taking a long time to render and sometimes timed out, even though
the other testing server ran just fine with the code changes.

To narrow down the cause I removed all code from the site except for
the web.config file and a simple html page saved with an aspx
extension. The test page still took 10 seconds to load. I then
changed the authorization section of web.config by removing the allow
roles tag and changed it to allowing all users. The page loaded very
quickly after that.

I also noticed that when I used Terminal Service to log onto the
machine the login process on that server took a long time.

Can anything think why this might be happening and what I can do to
resolve the problem? The server is a Windows 2000 server that is up to
date.