How do I reset all level policies back to original settings in XP?

[Rick Steele]

I have 2 PC's that are now running Windows XP in a Windows 2000
domain. When they were first setup they were in a Windows NT domain.
Some policy restrictions were made such as hiding the Control Panel
menu entry, denied the ability to change the time & date, among other
settings using the NT Poledit.exe. This has been a pain since the
first day and we would like to reset everything back to the original
default Windows XP settings on these 2 PC's.

I have tried reinstalling the setup security.inf template and that
made no difference.

I am at the point of reformatting the hard drives on these 2 PC's and
reloading them from scratch. Does anyone know of an absolute method of
forcing these 2 PC's back to original settings for all levels of
policies and security?

Thanks
Rick

 

[Roger Abell]

You have used System Policies and this tattooed values into
the systems in registry locations that were the only locations
prior to Windows 2000, but which are now depricated.
The recommend way to handle this is to reverse with poledit
the system policies prior to the time when poledit becomes of
no use on the machine (it enters an uplevel domain).
The setup security inf may be different for an upgrade compared
to a fresh install, so this may also account from some of what
you are seeing. However, this inf will not touch the depricated
registry locations. You could simply read the old files used by
system policy to locate the keys that you need to revert.