We are going down that road now as well. No I really did not optimize the network settings, but this had been done previously because of what appeared to be network latency issues. However, I did test this script on a win2k station I have. It ran in about 5 seconds there.

I wish I knew what I would have to do to fix this machine though. I changed domains and tried to preserve the registry. This may be where my problem is coming in. Since everything appears to be a SID based problem on this. I have not been deep enough in the registry to bring only 'username/sid' settings from a preserved registry for my new user into this registry.
Other than that I am going to have to consider my registry 'hosed'. At that point my next step is to reinstantiate the HKLM Hive that was created for my new user and take months to try to recreate reg keys.

This topic is becoming beyond the scope of this forum. I don't want to be too OT. But if anyone has any ideas, I would appreciate finishing this by email.