Disable windows 7 themes gpo

Also I got this via Google. C'mon people! Are we not IT?? Google first! Thanks guys. I've done a lot of searching and experimenting today. The articles you point to both deal with the user side of GPO. And I'm looking for a computer side solution since the target is a set of specific machines and the users have multiple machines some of which the policy won't apply to.

Added a computer config side preference to create a new key called test in the same location and no luck in it showing up. Quick access. Search related threads. Remove From My Forums. Answered by:. Archived Forums. Group Policy. Sign in to vote. Since you can execute theme files, you can add the file to run at startup in the registry or also by adding it to the startup folder I think. I have my theme in a read-only folder on the network and added a startup key on the machine.

One drawback of using a startup key is that if you look at the startup list in task manager it shows up as "Program" and if there is more than one you can't tell which is which. You may want to remove the startup key after a while or you can leave in place to force the theme to re-apply after every sign in. The problem with applying a theme to an existing user profile is that the registry key for setting the theme is per user.

There is no computer level theme setting as far as I can tell. Changing the path doesn't seem to change the theme though. I never found a better solution so I'm using the GPO to apply theme to new user sign-in. For some reason it is not applying all of the settings included in the theme. The slideshow duration is set to 6 hours but new users are set for 30 minutes.

I may just add running the theme file to a new user setup script we have and apply it manually for good measure. Another option is a login script you can apply to all users for a time then remove. Or add a logon script to change a system variable when it's applied or check the registry to see if it's applied. There are lots of hacky solutions but nothing provided by Microsoft for existing users unfortunately.

Although they are quite old, here are a couple of different Microsoft hotfixes for issues with this particular group policy setting not applying correctly in Windows 7 or Windows Server Not sure if they apply in your case, but here they are:. Hotfix 1. Hotfix 2. Yes No. Sorry this didn't help. Thanks for your feedback. This thread is locked. You can follow the question or vote as helpful, but you cannot reply to this thread.