I'd like to use the group policy editor to apply restrictions to all user accounts except that of the administrator on a Windows XP computer. In Windows Vista and up, this is easy to do as you're given a choice of which users to affect when adding a Group Policy Object snap-in to the MMC, but this functionality is not present in previous versions of Windows (i.e., group policy settings apply to all users).
There is a Microsoft support document (How to apply local policies to all users except administrators in a workgroup setting in Windows 2000) that offers a workaround, but it doesn't work (unless group policy is implemented in a substantially different way in Windows XP than it is in Windows 2000, which I doubt).
The crux of the problem is steps 9 through 11, which basically say:
- Make a backup of your group policy settings file (Registry.pol in %Systemroot%\System32\GroupPolicy\User).
- Alter your group policy settings.
- Overwrite your group policy settings file (altered in the previous step) with the backup.
As might be expected, this just reverts the alterations (I swallowed my pride and tried it just to be sure).
My question is: is this some sort of extensive typo? Have I missed something? It seems odd to have an entire article that boils down to one apparently nonsensical file operation.
Any comments would be appreciated.
