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I disabled TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper and started getting EventIDs 1030 and 1058. This thread said that I'd need to have it enabled. Indeed, when I started it up, the problem immediately went away. My question is, why? I thought NetBIOS wasn't needed unless you had Win98 clients on your network?

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The TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper Service is what allows NetBIOS to work over TCP/IP and SMB. In the specific case of Group Policy, this particular service allows your workstation to resolve the AD Domain (italy.addom.example.com) in a way that it can access the SYSVOL and pull the Group Policies themselves. Turn it off and it won't be able to resolve the AD DNS domain into something it can use to fetch policies. It seems backwards, but it's quite provable.

Back in September I had the exact problem you're having right now. One of our desktop images had that particular service disabled, and was not getting GPOs. Turning that service fixed it completely.

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  • Okay, thanks for the explanation (+1)...but I thought NetBIOS slowed down your network traffic and should only be enabled if it's really needed? So, it's always really needed? Or am I confusing two different uses of NetBIOS?
    – Kev
    Dec 1, 2010 at 23:07
  • You might be conflating NetBEUI and NetBIOS, which are different.
    – sysadmin1138 ♦
    Dec 1, 2010 at 23:31
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    I had forgotten about NetBEUI, but I think I still meant NetBIOS. But then there's serverfault.com/questions/119253/netbios-free-network and petri.co.il/disable_netbios_in_w2k_xp_2003.htm (particular the early paragraph beginning with 'Although...'.)
    – Kev
    Dec 2, 2010 at 2:20

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