UNC Paths in the System Path Variable

Issue - Intermittently Windows 7 machines hanging on "Please Wait" screen when starting up or rebooting.  Also, machines were hanging with the "Welcome" message after entering credentials.

 

 

We came across HotFix 2316513 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2316513) which addresses an issue with a Path variable reference being inaccessible.  This potentially fit our scenario since we append the System Path Variable with the UNC to configure the Network Oracle client on the Windows 7 machines. 

We ruled out the HotFix as a fix since it specifies that the HotFix does not apply to Universal Naming Convention (UNC) entries in the PATH system environment variable.  This caveat came with the following article which provides more information regarding UNC paths:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978856

We don’t necessarily see the error message in the title of this article (The Network path was not found) but in the Cause section of the article, it specifies:

“A system path that contains a UNC path may cause severe system problems and severe software problems. Therefore, a system path that contains a UNC path is unsupported.” 

The recommended workaround is:

“To work around this issue, delete the UNC paths from the system path variable. If the UNC paths must be added to the environment variables, use the user path environment variable.”

Import Certificate Using CERTUTIL.exe

Import certificate (certificate.cer) to Trusted Root Certification Authorities store from a Command Line using the following:
C:\windows\system32\certutil.exe -addstore ROOT \\servername\pathtocertificate.cer