Yikes-that sounds painful. If you find that disabling the service doesn't help, maybe use filemon/regmon from the sysinternals suite to discover what is changed when you disable it manually. If it's a registry value, you could write a custom .adm preference file to disable it via GPO.
I sure hope this is better in W7-we are likely skipping over Vista for the general population and heading there from XP. Offline files being off in places is important for our environment. From: Bill Songstad (WCUL) [mailto:administra...@waleague.org] Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2009 11:47 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: GPO puzzler I think you have led me down the road to victory, of a sort, Bonnie. I read a forum post archived from microsoft>public>windows>vista>networking_sharing (http://forum.soft32.com/win4/Disable-Offline-Files-grayed-ftopict168834.html) that suggested a bug requires the offline files to be disabled initially on the workstation in order for the GPO to work. So I deleted my GPO ( I couldn't disable offline folders manually as long as the GPO was even partially in effect) Disabled Offline Folders in Control Panel, rebooted, and reapplied the GPO. Now offline files are off and can't be re-enabled manually. For posterity, I tried re-applying the GPO after disabling and re-enabling the offline folders manually. No love. It definitely only stuck when the folders were off. I'd sure hate to have to do that for dozens of PCs though, let alone hundreds. Especially since the default behavior for Vista is that they are enabled. I think Ben's suggestion that disabling the offline folders service (CSCService) might help in that case. His suggestion sent me here: (http://www.experts-exchange.com/OS/Microsoft_Operating_Systems/Windows/Windows_Vista/Q_23532310.html) Thanks everyone. Looks like I'll get to keep my hair after all. Bill From: Miller Bonnie L. [mailto:mille...@mukilteo.wednet.edu] Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2009 6:59 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: GPO puzzler Hmm... kind of sounds like the GPO sets the value, but doesn't do anything about the current user offline file cache. In other words, I think the user would have to not already have an offline file cache for disabling it here to work. Maybe try a new (or another) user profile out that doesn't already have offline files and see if it does what you expect? You could also try another Vista computer in the same ou where that user does not have an offline file cache already. I know they've changed a lot with offline files, but I seem to remember having problems on XP when a user already had cached files and we tried to turn it off on a machine via gpo. -Bonnie From: Bill Songstad (WCUL) [mailto:administra...@waleague.org] Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 4:10 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: GPO puzzler Thanks Tim, I hadn't specifically added permissions for the PC, but I was under the impression that Authenticated Users should handle all the machines. I just went back and added the everyone group and the specific computer in question and gave them read permissions to the GPO on the delegation tab in Group Policy Management. Waited, updated, rebooted, still no love. Bill From: Tim Vander Kooi [mailto:tvanderk...@expl.com] Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 3:17 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: GPO puzzler Have you added Domain Computers (or similar security group) to the security settings of the GPO? We see this fairly regularly with Computer specific GPOs due to computer groups not being added by default. TVK From: Bill Songstad (WCUL) [mailto:administra...@waleague.org] Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 5:08 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: GPO puzzler Scenario: W2k3 domain Vista Business SP2 workstation Goal: Disable offline folders Strategy: Create AD OU: Domain > Local machines > vista workstations Place workstation into OU Create and link "disable offline folders" GPO to the previously mentioned OU Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Network > Offline Files > Allow or disallow use of the Offline Files Feature = disabled Wait several hours, reboot, wait again, run gpudate /force on the client, wait, reboot, wait Result: Offline files are still available and syncable Any idea where I dropped the ball on this? Running the Group Policy Results Wizard on the workstation shows the policy applied on the Computer Configuration but denied on the User Configuration with the reason "empty". Running the Group Policy Modeling Wizard with the same OUs shows nothing would be denied. Googling, Binging, and banging my head comes up with the usual culprit being trying to apply a user setting to an OU with only computers in it. But in this case I'm dealing with a computer setting in a group that only contains computers. Any help is appreciated. Bill ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
