I'm trying to find out if Group Policy is normally running on a Vista Home Premium system. While there are plenty of helpful people on the forum, most of them are running new versions of Windows. They can't tell me if these items are on a Vista system simply because they are not running it.
Vista Home Premium does not have a group policy manager installed. It is mainly for business versions like Enterprise and Professional. Could you please search your registry for "Group Policy" and tell me if you find any Group Policy entries (don't change anything in your registry) or if gpsvc (Group Policy Client) is running in your Task Manager Services tab?
Yes, if I run regedit > Edit > Find > "group policy" I get some results; and yes, gpsvc is running.
I reinstalled Vista about a month ago (something you should probably consider). As far as I know, the only thing I have done since then that would involve Group Policy was run a Microsoft Fix-it to disable Windows Side Bar.
Thank you Vistaar. Through looking at the registry entries, they appear to reference Group Policy programs installed in the System32 folder. The think missing from Home Premium appears to only be the User Interface. I did find a couple of other programs also used Group Policy in their settings.
I think that the only application of Group Policy in Vista is in regards to User Access Controls. That is, whether or not a user is a standard user or an administrator, the available permissions vary.