Former member of domain, still suffering domain policies

bungeecork

I have an XP latop that was a domain member of a domain with "no user can change their wallpaper or screensaver" policies.

The laptop was decommissioned and removed from the domain and I have the domain administrator and local administrator passwords. But the wallpaper selection buttons are greyed out and when I change wallpaper by right-clicking on a picture in IE and selecting "Set as wallpaper", the picture only appears when the laptop is locked during a login or at startup and shutdown. I can change from "Modified Theme" during a session but there is no apparent change to the theme during the session and after a restart the "Modified Theme" is back as the selection.

What to do?

Capt'n Midnight

decomissioned eh ? - did you remove all doucments and delete all users and do a secure delete on the empty space then ?

try moving it to a workgroup / run gpedit.msc

Heathen

look for poledit.exe too.. hand little program for derestricting pc's

Heathen

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

decomissioned eh ? - did you remove all doucments and delete all users and do a secure delete on the empty space then ?

try moving it to a workgroup / run gpedit.msc

oops sorry i just realised that gpedit is poledit in XP lol... sorry

Capt'n Midnight

Don't you love the way they keep reinventing the wheel. Maybe it's to prevent any of the boot camp MCSE's being able to support older systems and thus forcing companies to upgrade because they can't find the staff. Or maybe it's to force people to keep going on courses. Or maybe the constant renaming serves some useful function for the customers.

Cryos

bungeecork wrote:

I have an XP latop that was a domain member of a domain with "no user can change their wallpaper or screensaver" policies.

The laptop was decommissioned and removed from the domain and I have the domain administrator and local administrator passwords. But the wallpaper selection buttons are greyed out and when I change wallpaper by right-clicking on a picture in IE and selecting "Set as wallpaper", the picture only appears when the laptop is locked during a login or at startup and shutdown. I can change from "Modified Theme" during a session but there is no apparent change to the theme during the session and after a restart the "Modified Theme" is back as the selection.

What to do?

gpupdate /force should clear policys on that system as it will be unable to pull any new policys

bungeecork

Thanks for your help guys but still no cheese;

- came from a DMS system so there were no docs to delete, but all users were deleted and the laptop removed from the domain, the laptop was renamed and a workgroup was created.
- gpedit runs but indicates that all policies are "Not Configured"
- gpupdate /force runs and indicates all policies refreshed

bungeecork

Does anyone know the difference between the background/wallpaper you see when unlocking a login session, and the background/wallpaper you see after you've unlocked the session?

sirlinux

logon wallpaper
HKEY_USERS\ .DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop

there is a key there for wallpaper

as for gp's run gpedit and set the wallpaper to be enforced to what you want to overwrite the domain gp's.

bungeecork

Thanks sirlinux. I'm not quite where I want to be but you helped me closer to it. I enforced and then returned to not configured using gpedit - now when I right-click and "set as wallpaper" the wallpaper changes.
I still can't change the wallpaper using properties but I'm happier.
Thanks again

Orion

Try moving the C:\Windows\System32\Group Policy folder to somewhere else. That's where local policies are stored.

In GPO there is an option to have the domain policies applied even after the machine has left the network. They are stored in this folder. If you remove the folder and reboot all policies should be removed.

calex71

Maybe an obvious question but why not rebuild the laptop?
I know all you are trying to do is change the wall paper
but if the laptop was previously used in a domain etc
would it not make more sense to start with a clean slate?

bungeecork

I'd rather live with a blue desktop rather than rebuild the laptop and reinstall everything, but you're right.

Orion

Did you try removing the Group Policy folder like I suggested?

bungeecork

I'm on holidays here and have only my laptop, if I screw that up I'm offline 'til March 1st when I get back home. I'll live with the policies and try moving / renaming the folder once I get home. Thanks Marcos42