Group Policy: Troubleshooting
Changing Windows registry may result in hard to handle errors; in most cases, these setting leave no obvious logs and it's not a trivial task to determine the reason for the possible problem.
Changing Group Policy, as well as any registry modification, may result in strange, hard to cope with errors and unexpected behavior. Here are simple steps to make one's life easier when dealing with such modifications.
Open an Event Viewer and select Custom Views -> Administrative Events. Group Policy events will appear in that view; check for one and examine its details.
Staying in Event Viewer, look in Applications and Services Logs\Microsoft\Windows\Group Policy\Operational and find the matching event ID you see in the logs for Group Policy events.
Now start or return to Group Policy editor and make a modification. Immediately after that, check the two mentioned views to determine an event type and all the related information. Clearing up the event logs could help in situation when logs are tpp long, complex and mixed with other events.
Utilities like GPLogView may be of still better use in case one needs rather complex policy changes and you need to track all the consequences it produces.
This article was brought to you by the developers of IPHost Network Monitor, network and server monitoring software.