There been a long-standing issue, ever since IE 7 was introduced, related to GPMC and the use of IE Maintenance Policy. Specifically, if you defined zone security in IE Maintenance policy from a machine running IE 7, and then tried to view a settings report on that GPO from GPMC running on Vista or XP (and presumably also 2003), you would get the following error on the Report tab:
An error occurred while generating report:
An unknown error occurred while the HTML report was being created.
XP would also throw this error if you tried to view an RSOP report on a machine that had received this policy. Until recently, the workaround would be to only use Admin. Template policy to define zone security. Specifically, you can do this under:
User ConfigurationAdministrative TemplatesWindows ComponentsInternet ExplorerInternet Control PanelSecurity PageSite to Zone Assignment List
Well, I just loaded up the new version of GPMC that comes with RSAT for Vista, Sp1 and it appears that this IE Maintenance problem is fixed! Of course, all that means is that you know have to use GPMC on Vista, Sp1 if you want to be able to get correct settings reports for IE Maintenance Policy, but its something!
Tags:
Group Policy, Internet Explorer Maintenance, GPMC
MAR
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.