Group Policy on a Win2K domain won't apply to an XP Pro workstation.

[Jeremy]

I have a Win2k domain with a Group Policy that among
other things forces the screensaver to lock the machine
after 7 min of inactivity. The GP works great with Win2K
Pro clients, however, does not apply when I put a WinXP
Pro client on the domain. Executing gpupdate on the XP
client doesn't help. Anyone run into this before?

 

[Roger Abell]

Group policy application onto XP clients works.
I suggest you first exhaust standard GP troubleshooting
What does RSoP on the client show ? Is it seeing the
policy at all? Is the client in the right OU? Is the DNS
setting of the client correct? etc.

 

[Jeremy]

Those are all good suggestions I'm sure, but I'm going to
need a little help with them. I am a network guy and
don't know a great deal about the topic at hand. How do
I run RSoP? How do I determine if it sees the GP? (I
don't think it does.) I have clients in both the default
computers OU and other OU's that have the GP applied to
them. Please explain how DNS would affect the
application of the GP. I do believe that DNS is correct
but an explenation may shed additional light. As I said
all of the Win2k machines work just fine so I thought
there must be something slightly different about how XP
interacts with the GP.

Thanks for the help!

 

[Roger Abell]

If the W2k work and the XP are in the same location in
Active Directory (and hence subject to the same GPOs)
then check that the Tcp/Ip settings for DNS on the XP
client is identical to that on the working W2k.
The SRV records must be located via DNS for many
Active Directory features to work.
RSoP is Resultant Set Of Policy - there is a snap-in
by this name that you can load into an mmc console.
It will tell you what policies are being seen and applied.
These are all rather sizable topics, about which the MS
website has How-To guides you can probably turn up
with a little bit of search.