Stuck on the "Please wait for the group policy client" screen during startup

I am using a Desktop computer that is dual booted with Windows Vista and Windows 7 on two separated partitions. Last week when I was working with Vista suddenly I got a BSOD with error stop c0000218 saying something about corrupted registry key. Hence worked on it and replaced the corrupted registry.

Later I got an error message saying LogonUI.exe bad image and there is something was wrong with your authui.exe file. Hence I replaced the same as well by loggin into safe mode. And now, as I mentioned in the title as well, whenever I start my computer and try to boot into Vista, just before the log in screen appears, I get the following message with spinning circle like we see after updating windows:

“Please wait for the group policy client”

This message keeps looping here forever. It is just not able to go even reach the login window. I tried to boot into Safe Mode again to see if I can do anything to fix it but am no more able to go into safe mode as well. Any suggestions for this ?

Well I don’t blame you but everybody knows that playing with registries may damaged the system as well and that seems to be implemented in your case. I must say that your Vista os is badly damaged and there is no other way than doing a clean install. As you said you have Windows 7 as well on second partition, login with the same backup your files and folders if you can and format the Vista partition and reinstall Vista. If your desktop / laptop is the OEM sort of system than better try resetting before your format it.

Can you tell us how many policies are applied to the OU in which the problematic machine account resides? Have you tried to block the policy inheritance? Did you enforce any policy? You can try to disable block inheritance and dont enforce any policy and check the results. It still it doesnt work then disjoin and rejoin the server which is having issues back to the domain and see if it works.

What DNS did you point to after setting the IP address? I think that you might have one or more DCs running DNS which you have to point to. If the correct DNS is not used by you then you might have Group Policy issues. Can you try to log into the console of the server with the Admin account? If yes then can you check the Event Log to see what is happening?

Can you try to check your computer for duplicate copies of HsAddin.dll and HsTBar.xla and delete them all but just keep the ones that are in the installation folder of SmartView. You will also have to remove any duplicates of the other SmartView dlls though. After that register the dlls in the SmartView\bin folder. Also, you will have to log into your computer as an administrator to get it to work.