“The time has come the Ballmer said to talk of many things. That IE Maintenance has to go and Blue will ship in Spring.”
Wait – what! IE Maintenance has to go? Come again Mr. Ballmer – did you just say it is already gone?
If IE Maintenance is missing, how can I edit settings like a homepage? The easy answer is – use a Windows 7 GPMC. The best answer is – use a Windows 7 GPMC to migrate those settings to Group Policy Preferences or Administrative Templates.
Your first step is to get a list of GPOs containing IE Maintenance settings. In a Windows 7 GPMC, right click on your domain name and select search.
Under Search Items, specify user configuration. For condition, select contains. Finally, set Internet Explorer Branding as the Value. Press Add and then Search. After a few minutes, every GPO containing IE Maintenance settings will be returned. You can then select the save results button to export this list to a CSV. As a note, if you are using GPMC for Windows 8 – the value field will not populate. You will either need to use PowerShell to search or use GPMC for Windows 7 until this bug is fixed.
The hard part is now done. Now it is time for the tedious part. In GPMC (Windows 7), view a report for each GPO in your list. You will want to ensure that Internet Explorer Maintenance is indeed listed under User Configuration\Policies\Windows Settings\.
You will likely notice that some GPOs were listed in your report but do not show IE maintenance settings in a report of the GPO. This is because you have serious AD replication issues.
Just kidding. When you remove a setting in Group Policy, these settings are not instantly grabbed by clients. Because of this, GPOs will keep blank settings if you unconfigure certain CSEs. For example, you removed a setting for folder redirection. Three months goes by and a user returns from maternity leave. She logs into her computer and Group Policy sees the blank settings and makes adjustments. If the blank settings were not there, she would continue to apply the obsolete settings while everyone else has the current configs.
Coming back from that tangent, make a note of each setting that you configure in IE Maintenance. You will now need to edit each GPO containing IE Maintenance settings. Browse to Internet Explorer Maintenance – right click – and select Reset Browser Settings.
With your list of settings, you can now use this guide to migrate over to Administrative Templates or Group Policy Preferences: Internet Settings. And if you want to learn about more about Group Policy and how you can do more, then subscribe by email and get your guide to the Windows 8 Administrative Start Menu!
We are experiencing this issue. I think I may be overlooking something. I saved the .csv file, but not sure what to do with it. The IE Maintenance line is missing from the GPO for Main Policy, however it DOES appear in the summary report for that GPO.
So you write: “You will now need to edit each GPO containing IE Maintenance settings. Browse to Internet Explorer Maintenance – right click – and select Reset Browser Settings.”
Questions: What do I do with the csv file and how do I edit the item that is not showing?
You will have to do this on a Windows 7 machine that doesn’t have IE10 loaded yet. That is how you can see those removed settings.
My apologies, the machines in our network are all Windows 7. The Group Policy Management Console is on a virtual Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. I am assuming, after re-reading the top paragraph, I cannot apply this fix to my server, to correct (remove) the IE setting.
You will have to install the RSAT tools on a windows 7 machine that has IE9 – then remove the settings from that machine.
Joseph,
Light dawns. Over thinking this. A good night’s sleep allowed me to get past my mental block. So yes, I created a virtual Windows 7 machine and joined it to the domain (which happens to be off site), first uninstalled the IE Update (to v11) from Programs and Features (view installed updates), then verified IE 9 or less was under Windows Features (happened to be IE 8), installed the Remote Server Administrative Tools, but just the Group Policy Management. Then, low and behold, as you predicted, the correct IE Maintenance section was available for editing. Cleared the wrong homepage out. Went into the actual Group Policy Management Console and the setting is gone, homepage removed, and everything is right with the world. Thank you for hanging in with me on this.
I am glad you got it all straightened out! Let me know if you run into anymore issues.
Thanks Joseph for the info you provided as it helped us with our IEM cleaning for IE10.
We got another issue post IE10 install and I hope you don’t mind I mentioned your blog in mine on that topic: http://theplatformadmin.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/fix-ie10-rsop-warning-internet-explorer.html
BR,
Manuel
Thank you for sharing that link! It was a good read!