User logon freezes with empty desktop - GPO issue??

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general (More info?)

I believe that I'm having a GPO update issue but I can't track the
source.

Environment:

Windows XP Pro English and French workstations, Windows server
2003(Multi domain AD with GPO's)

Scenario:

These events are not reproducible as required and happen at random
itervals (which is what is driving me crazy)

User attempts to login with network password on French workstation.
Logon screen disapears and the normal XP background is displayed, but
that's as far as the user gets. The workstation stays "frozen" like
that until the user does a Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the Windows
Security window and then they can logoff.

I can login to the same workstation as local admin everything appears
to be fine until I try to do a gpresult to see if the GPO's are OK.
When I run GPRESULT, I get an access denied message! What is that, I'm
local admin?

If I then run: gpupdate /force and reboot the machine, the user can now
login properly and I can also run GPRESULT again as the local
administrator.

Question is, does anybody know what could be messing up the local
security context on the workstation?

I have a workaround, but I need a fix to the problem since even after
the workaround gets the workstation working again the problem will come
back after a week or so. In one case it took a month, but the same
problem happened again!

We have used GHOST and SYSPREP to create French and English images that
we are restoring on our workstations; the same install and
configuration process was done for the French and English images.

We are using the same workstation GPO for both the French and English
workstations on the network, but we are experiancing this random user
profile problem only on the French workstations. Before anyone asks, no
I can't get rid of the French workstations .

I've tried to turn on full registry and file auditing to see if I can
figure out if something is happenning during the automated update of
the GPO's on the workstations but without any luck!

Any info would be greatly appreciated!

Marc