Group Policy not waiting to finish on startup

This was a fun one. A laptop was getting "group policy failed due to lack of network connectivity" with a bunch of 1724 errors. After much digging, this turns out to be an easy fix. I would recommend the registry fix, as it seems most computers have no problems with the default settings.

There are two ways to enable this option:

• Group Policy
  Computer Configuration > [Policies] > Administrative Templates > System >Group Policy > Startup Policy Processing Wait Time – Enable the option and set wait time to 10 - 60 seconds
  Note 1: This option is only supported by Windows Vista and later clients and may be not present on Server 2003 domain controllers
  Note 2: Group policy description tells that the default wait time is 30 seconds, which obviously raises the question how setting time-out to less than 30 seconds can fix the problem. It seems that default 30 seconds interval is not always used and Windows often employs its own algorithms to calculate the time-out (if it's not enforced by Group Policy or Registry)
• Registry
  On Client Computer:
1. Start > Regedit.exe
2. Navigate to  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
3. Create New DWORD value with name GpNetworkStartTimeoutPolicyValue and set Value data (decimal) to the required timeout interval in seconds
4. Restart the computer 

Source: http://www.mysysadmintips.com/windows/active-directory/165-windows-7-machines-fail-to-apply-software-installation-group-policy-on-startup