This is a horribly late reply, but it's worth answering anyway. The reason the w3wp.exe process is growing is because of a memory leak in the AD provider. We hired Microsoft Premeire Support to help us figure it out. We found one of the classes which is using S.DirectoryServices API is “DotNetNuke.Authentication.*” and the method currently the application is in hang state is “DotNetNuke.Authentication.ActiveDirectory.ADSI.Search.GetEntries()”. The class in this method we are using is “SearchResultCollection” and we are not Dispoing this object. If you look at the remarks section in the http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.directoryservices.searchresultcollection.aspx you will find the following quote: "Due to implementation restrictions, the SearchResultCollection class cannot release all of its unmanaged resources when it is garbage collected. To prevent a memory leak, you must call the Dispose method when the SearchResultCollection object is no longer needed." We need to Dispose the object used for this class. Also as a best programming practices for System.DirectoryServices API we need to call Close() & Dispose() for DirectoryEntry objects and Dispose() of SearchResultCollection, Dispose() of DirectorySearcher class objects. I immediately passed this along to the AD Authentication Provider lead, and he says that he can bundle this change into a future release. But you can change it yourself if you get the source code for this. Hope this helps! Jason