94 Microsoft Windows NT Server White Paper
Recent Updates to Policies Since Retail Release
The following changes have been made to System Policies support since the
initial retail release of Windows NT 4.0.
•
When a policy file was to be downloaded, if the validating domain control-
ler name was 13 characters or longer, the policy would not be applied.
This has been resolved in Service Pack 3.
•
NoNetConnectDisconnect
,
NoTrayContextMenu
,
NoViewCon-
textMenu
,
NoFileMenu
, and
DisableTaskMgr
were added in Service
Pack 2. For more information on these, see the section, “Registry Keys
Modified by the System Policy Editor Default Templates.”
•
In Service Pack 2 and later, the policy file is no longer cached. This
change was made to increase security. Instead of being cached, the policy
file is downloaded at each logon, written to a temporary file, and applied.
•
When the
NoViewContextMenu
policy was introduced, it did not support
the tree view on the left-hand side of Explorer. This was corrected in
Service Pack 3. If this option is turned on, context menus for both the list
view and the tree view are disabled.
•
Manual mode policy path expansion support was added in Service Pack 3.
If you specify a policy path in the
registry
(rather than using Automatic
mode), Windows NT now supports paths in the form of
\\someserver\share\
ntconfig.pol.
•
If the administrator created a new policy file and turned on synchronous
logon scripts, saved it to disk, and reloaded the policy file, the policy set-
ting would be lost because the .adm file needed modification in three
different places. This was corrected in Service Pack 3.
•
Changing the location of a user’s
Start
menu caused duplicate
Programs
items. If you used the System Policy Editor to change the
Custom Start
Menu
to point to a different directory (even an empty one), the user would
receive the normal
Programs
menu item and a
Programs
menu item
above it that pointed to the All Users programs directory. This has been
corrected in Service Pack 3.
•
The Microsoft Office 97 Resource Kit contains .adm files that administra-
tors can use when configuring the Office environment for their users. This
is available now from Microsoft.
