RDBSS process insomnia preventing Windows 7 sleep mode

I’ve been researching power management in SCCM (reporting and configurations) and came across an interesting problem/resolution that I’d like to share.

In SCCM reports, if you run the Insomnia Report (Reports\Power Management\Power Management – Insomnia Report) against your main workstations collection (choose 30 days), you may notice that a high percentage of your workstations are prevented from sleeping by a process listed as “rdbss”.

For example in this report 166 devices were found that experienced this issue in the last 30 days.

At another location we had 50% (~250+) of our workstation and at another barely any (go figure). Investigating this further I discovered that Windows 7 will by default fail to enter sleep mode if it sees that a network file is open. This issue has been resolved in Windows 8.

I found a group policy modification to correct this behavior and allow sleep mode regardless, thus preventing the “rdbss” condition;

After making this modification to our workstations and rerunning the insomnia report a week later (limited to 7 days) we’re down to only a handful of computers still suffering from “rdbss”.

With the new group policy setting in place this has resulted in massive energy savings. As you can see below, running the Energy Consumption by Day report, we've realized at minimum a 75% decrease in power usage since implementation. That equates to approximately a $28,000 energy savings per year at one site.

 Here's a snapshot before the modification, using the Computer Activity Report in SCCM. Here you can see the computer "on" state in relation to daily usage. It's apparent something is wrong here.

Here's post setting change. This looks much better.

The built in reports in SCCM are priceless.