I will describe in this post an incident we had in our production environment and the different troubleshooting steps to resolve this issue. When we launched a GPMC, the console froze when we clicked on an OU in order to display the Policy Objects linked to it. The problem occurred only when the GPMC was connected to a particular Domain Controller (PDC emulator in our case), if we switched to another DC the GPMC was OK.

There was no problem with GPOs in our domain: Replication was ok and GPOs were applied correctly on our computers/users objects. But we could not edit anymore GPOs connected to this DC. While the GPMC was hanging there was a lsass.exe CPU overload on the DC until the console was killed. Therefore we had to edit GPOs connected to any other DC, so the production environment was working near normal during the resolution of the incident.

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A new category has been added to the blog sidebar called “Latest AD news”. This add-on gives you access to all the latest posts I have found on the web that are relevant and related to Active Directory. You will notice the release of GPS a few days ago, this application is a search engine dedicated to GPOs. Input a keyword and it gives you the right parameters to edit under your GPMC. For more information about this tool, read this AskDS post.