Some organisations may experience long loading times for Smartcard Connect when starting or restarting Windows 11 machines.
This is because Windows 11 sometimes delays launching start‑up programs until the computer's CPU is idle, which can cause NHS Credential Management and Smartcard Connect to start late after login.
What to do
The following steps using the Windows registry tell Windows to launch these programs immediately:
- Press Windows Key + R, type regedit, and press Enter.
- Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer.
- Right-click Explorer in the left-hand panel, hover over New, and select Key.
- Name the new key Serialize.
- Right-click in the right-hand panel, hover over New, and select DWORD (32-bit) Value.
- In the name field for the new value, type StartupDelayInMSec. Leave Data as the default value (0).
- Right-click in the right-hand panel again, hover over New, and select DWORD (32-bit) Value.
- In the name field for the second new value, type WaitForIdleState. Leave Data as the default value (0).
StartupDelayInMSec=0 removes the normal startup-app delay. WaitForIdleState=0 explicitly prevents waiting for the idle state. Microsoft explains this configuration in a recent Microsoft Q&A response.
For these changes to come into effect you will need to reboot the machine or log out and in again.
About these registry changes
These changes only affect startup applications managed by Explorer - they will not override any start-up settings set locally. If you have any local settings that affect the start-up of NHS Credential Management and Smartcard Connect you will need to remove them for the registry changes above to be successful. This includes:
- a scheduled task configured with 'Start the task only if the computer is idle' - you'll need to remove this from the task itself (see Microsoft documentation)
- a Windows service configured as 'Automatic (Delayed Start)' - you'll need to change it to 'Automatic' (see Microsoft documentation)
- an application's own internal startup delay
- Group Policy logon-script processing delays
