Group Policy Blog, by the "GPOGUY"-- Darren Mar-Elia : Vista, Logon Scripts

Vista logon script issues revisited, again

dmarelia — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 11:24:00 GMT

In an earlier post I talked about some issues with UAC interfering with GP logon scripts in Vista, and I referenced an MS-TechNet article that describes how you can work around it by using a special script called "launchapp.wsf" that adds the logon script to a scheduled task rather than running it directly. Well, in that article, they gave a screenshot (see below) of how that would work, but after testing it myself I realized that their screenshot is incorrect.

The problem with it is that, if you just enter "logon.bat" as your parameters, the client is not going to find logon.bat unless its in its local path. Most people keep their logon scripts in the SYSVOL part of the GPO, so you'll have to put the full path to that file in the "Script Parameters" dialog above for this to work. For example, here's a path to my logon.bat script file in one of my GPOs: \\cpandl.com\SysVol\cpandl.com\Policies\{BC13169A-DB63-4D53-A39D-83D826D8A03C}\User\Scripts\Logon\logon.bat

I've emailed MS to let them know that they probably need to update their article, but in the meantime, this does work when you get all the params correct.

Follow up to Vista logon script issues

dmarelia — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 09:25:00 GMT

After bringing up the logon script issues on Vista that I previously blogged on with the Microsoft Group Policy Folks, they pointed me to the following document:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/5ae8da2a-878e-48db-a3c1-4be6ac7cf7631033.mspx

This document talks about using some of the GP features in Vista and there is a section in there entitled, "Group Policy Scripts can fail due to User Account Control" which describes the workaround to this problem. It appears to be a timing issue with respect to when the script runs compared to when the desktop is available. It is related to UAC as well. In that document, in Appendix A, there is a WSH script that you can run, that calls your logon script using a Scheduled Task, which helps delay when your logon script runs until the desktop is fully available (at least that's my assumption). So, if you having problems with logon scripts in Vista, this is the solution!

Logon script issues with Vista?

dmarelia — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 08:29:00 GMT

I've started to hear murmurs on my GPTalk mailing list about people having problems running GPO-based logon scripts against Vista systems. In one circumstance, Jeremy Moskowitz was having problems running a batch file that mapped network drives. It seems that while the drive mapping completed successfully, the drive was unavailable until the next logon. In another circumstance, which I've heard repeated a few times now, .vbs based logon scripts failed to run at all. The issue appears related to the User Account Control (UAC) feature in Vista because when UAC is disabled, the script runs fine. However, in my own testing and for some others, both batch files and .vbs scripts that did network drive mapping ran fine against Vista RTM systems. So, its not clear yet whether there is one issue here or just a series of issues that might be causing this. Stay tuned as I get more info and post a Comment here if you're having issues with Vista running logon scripts.