2017-11-19

Disabling the Group Policy Client Service in Windows

Scenario:
  • You are an administrator on your machine.
  • Your machine is either:
    • In a Windows Domain, and you don't want the domain admins messing with it.
    • Not in a Windows Domain, and you just don't want useless services running.
In this case, what you probably want to do is prevent the Group Policy Client Service from running on your machine.  Unfortunately, that's not a straightforward task to accomplish, because if you go to "services" and try to stop or disable this service, Windows doesn't let you.

Here is how to do it.

These instructions have worked for me on Windows 7; they might also work on other versions of windows.  If there is anything in these instructions that you don't quite understand, what it means is that these instructions are not for you;  don't try to follow them, you are going to wreck things.  Ignore this post, move on.
  1. Using regedit go to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\gpsvc and:
    1. Change the owner to yourself.
    2. Grant Administrators (not just you) full control.
    3. Change the value of “Start” from “2” to “4”.
  2. Now go to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Winlogon\Notifications\Components\GPClient and:
    1. Change the owner to yourself.
    2. Grant Administrators (not just you) full control.
    3. Delete the entire key. (Possibly after exporting it so as to have a backup.)
  3. Restart your machine.