Event 5719, then 1054. Trying to connect to DC before NIC is ready (?)

Hello guys,

I have a very small remote office (2 pc's) on a 10.10.2.0 subnet - connected by a permanent state VPN. to our 10.10.1.0 head office subnet.  The DC's all reside on the 10.10.1.0 subnet (I do intend to put in a DC in the remote branch at some point, but that's not the issue today!)

After months of running OK, recently the workstations have been having problems in the morning (finding the Head Office exchange server etc). I've (potentially) tracked this down to the domain DCs in the head office not being available on logon at boot time to the branch office PC's ... i'll explain ...

I've cleared out the event log and rebooted on an offending machine and found that it is giving me Events 5719/1054 (no domain controller to logon to) in the System/Application logs *before* the "NIC card is ready" event log - which obviously isn't going to help matters! In a nutshell, it looks like it's trying to hook to the DC's before the Nic card is ready. I think.

Once the machines is 'up' there is are no actually connectivity problems - pings and such like are all good - but the 'lack of trust' and not having a DC to connect to at boot time is causes me lots of knock-on effects.

I'm not the worlds greatest Sys Admin 'friad ... a bit of a 'jack of all trades' ... any pointers would be very appreciated.

DCs are Windows 2003

Workstations are running XP Sp2

Nic cards are INTEL 82566DM Gigabit and I've just updated the drivers (to no avail)

Thanks.

S.S.