gpedit policy missing: Turn off tabbed browsing

J

James P. H. Fuller

Where I work we just installed a very large client-server package--a RIS,
which will mean something to you if you happen to work in a hospital's
radiology department but probably not otherwise. The RIS client-end software
runs as an IE plugin. The package vendor has some special requirements for
configuring IE, two of which are that it has to be IE7 and tabbed browsing
has to be turned off.

IE7 is what we'be got. Turning off tabbed browsing within IE individually
for each user on each machine is not much of an option because these are
shared radiologists' workstations (with big diagnostic-quality monitors.) 15
stations times 14 radiologist logins each = you get to log in 210 times to do
this job manually.

It ought to be simple to do the same thing for all users of a given station
at once using gpedit. Unfortunately the "Turn off tabbed browsing" setting in
gpedit is MIA on all these machines for some reason. (All are XP SP3.) Start
gpedit, go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Internet
Explorer. "Turn off tabbed browsing" should be there and configurable, along
with "Turn off pop-up management", "Disable change proxy settings" and the
others. But it isn't there.

The "Turn off tabbed browsing" policy is there on an XP SP3 PC I have at
home (though not configured), and I can see the the actual code for it in
inetres.adm. So what's the right approach here to get it back on the work pcs?

1. I know how to load in an .adm file containing a single policy, but I'm
under time pressure here and I doubt I could write one from scratch without
study and some examples to look at. Is there a way to make gpedit export just
this single policy as an .adm file so I can carry the file to work and load
it in to the machines that don't have it?

2. If you can't do that, is inetres.adm directly editable? To make the "Turn
off tabbed browsing" policy available and configurable on the PCs that don't
have it, would it be enough just to paste...

POLICY !!NoTabBrowsing
#if version >= 4
SUPPORTED !!SUPPORTED_IE7
#endif

EXPLAIN !!IE_ExplainNoTabBrowsing
KEYNAME "Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TabbedBrowsing"
VALUENAME "Enabled"
VALUEON NUMERIC 0
VALUEOFF NUMERIC 1

END POLICY

....into inetres.adm? Is there anything else that would have to be edited?
Anything special to be careful about concerning permissions, ownership, etc.
Is inetres.adm one of the files that System File Checker is watching for
changes it thinks are unauthorized? Any other gotchas?

3. Is there some different and better way to restore "Turn off tabbed
browsing" that I don't know about?

Thanks very much to anyone whose knowledge is deeper than mine here!
 
N

news.online.no

You say you on a client server system. The correct way to change what you
are after is in the group policy on the domain controller. I suggest you
talk to your admin and get them to make a group for your RIS machines and
apply the required settings through a tailored GP for just that group.

Hope that helps.
Dave
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Top