Group Policy to prevent File Association Dialog?

[Peter]

This may not be the correct forum but the same query on the "policies"
forum produced no results. Any help would be appreciated.

I'm administrator in a school and we use quite strong group policies
attempting to keep the students focussed on what they are meant to be
doing. Workstations are running XP SP2 and servers are mostly Win2KSP4


Third party apps such as flash and shockwave readers are essential for
some web browsing on other apps, so they are installed onto the
standard workstation image.


We block direct (double-click) associations to SWF files via a registry

setting in the login script without affecting SWF files run from web
pages.


However students (always being two steps ahead) have worked out that,
if they stick a SWF game on their USB drive and change its extension
(eg. to *.zzz) and then double-click on the file, the File Associations

dialog blithely pops up asking them what application they wish to
run... much to the annoyance of teachers.


I can switch off the File Association Web Service using group policies
but can't switch the File Association dialog for "unknown file
extensions"


Any suggestions?


Thanks, Peter

 

[Steven L Umbach]

You might look into using Software Restriction Policies for the XP Pro
computers to prevent them from running an application from the USB drive.
SRP can be as simple as a path rule disallowing executables on drives other
than the system drive and can be configured via Group Policy for computer
configuration even with a W2K domain controller. The link below explains SRP
in more detail and it would be easy to configure and test on a computer via
Local Security Policy.

Steve

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/rstrplcy.mspx