Programming

How to apply Group Policy Drive mappings in Vista without disabling the UAC

Jun 29th

I finally got around to trying to figure out what was a better way of implementing drive mappings without having to go around to each computer to disable the UAC in Vista. For most people using the computer in the office, this is a good thing as it usually helps prevent unwanted things from running and in the long run saving me time from having to do maintenance on it. When I last looked at trying to get Vista to run my GPO scripts that mounted the drives in my UNC, I had to disable the UAC before it would run them. Apparently this is because the scripts run at a higher privilege level during the login process, and because UAC is running at that time the scripts don’t get executed. Because of this it is necessary to run the scripts after the login process. The techcenter post from Microsoft is a bit cryptic at best and doesn’t cover mixed environments where you have XP and Vista machines running. So the best thing to do is to add in this script that I found on the Internet that is a modified version of Microsoft’s launchapp.wsf. Place this in your GPO’s scripts logon area. And then under the script path, enter in the location of your working XP script one at a time. Essentially this wsf script becomes a wrapper for your vbs code that will determine if the machine you are logging on to is a XP or Vista machine, and then execute the drive mapping script code appropriately. Below you can find the code to implement.

Note: Remember to be patient as when you implement the new GPOs it might take time to replicate over your system. Other things might affect the update such as DFS, network lag, etc. You can force the PC to update their GPO by running the command:

gpupdate /force

Script wrapper code: