Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 manual Recent Updates to Policies Since Retail Release

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.

94 Microsoft Windows NT Server White Paper