I found this issue recently–at first I thought it was just my environment, but have confirmed it on a couple of different environments. When you are on a Win 7 box (and probably R2 as well), in GPMC and viewing the setttings of a GPO that had previously been created and contains software restriction policies, you will get an error when GPMC tries to display those SRP settings. Specifically, the error looks like this:
| Software Restriction Policies Software Restriction Policies/Security Levels Software Restriction Policies/Additional Rules |
| The following errors apply to all of the above settings: |
| An unknown error occurred while data was gathered for this extension. Details: Unable to cast object of type ‘System.String[]‘ to type ‘Microsoft.GroupPolicy.Reporting.Extensions.Registry.UnknownType’. |
From the looks of it, it appears to be a bug in the way the Win 7 GPMC object model is parsing these settings. I’ve reported it to MS but wanted to let everyone know about it so you don’t think you’re going crazy. Not surprisingly, if I open the GP Editor on this GPO, all of the SRP settings appear fine. This is only an issue with the GPMC reporting of settings.
Tags
Group Policy, Windows 7, Software Restriction Policies
NOV
About the Author:
Darren Mar-Elia is CTO & Founder of SDM Software, Inc. Darren has over 25 years of IT and Software experience in the Microsoft technology area, including serving as a Director in Infrastructure at Charles Schwab, CTO of Windows Management Solutions at Quest Software, and Sr. Director of Product Engineering at DesktopStandard. He has been a Microsoft MVP in Group Policy technology for the last 6 years and has written and spoken on Active Directory, Group Policy and PowerShell topics frequently over the years. He maintains the popular Group Policy resource web site at www.gpoguy.com and has been a contributing editor for Windows IT Pro Magazine since 1997. He has written and contributed to twelve books on Windows. Darren also speaks frequently at conferences on Windows infrastructure topics.