Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 813338 contains the following summary:
For domains with many policies and domain
controllers with slow wide area network (WAN)
lines,
replicating
the SYSVOL share can take a
long time.
This is most noticeable when you promote
a new domain controller at a
location with slow connectivity or when you
run a
non-authoritative
restore of SYSVOL.
To speed up the process,
reduce the number of files and amount of data that must be
replicated in the
SYSVOL share.
Because Administrative Templates (that is,
.adm files) take up the most
space in policies,
remove them to significantly
reduce the size of SYSVOL.
For
example,
with the default Administrative Templates,
each policy takes up 870
kilobytes (KB) of disk space.
If you have 1,300 policies,
you can
reduce the
size of SYSVOL from 1,100 megabytes (MB) to 35 MB (or
27 KB per
policy).
You can use Group Policy settings to change the behavior of Group Policy Editor
regarding .adm files in Microsoft Windows Server 2003.
For additional information,
click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
316977 Group Policy template behavior in Windows Server 2003
