When I create a Regional Options Preference, my settings are not saved!

Posted September 10, 2008

[- or: Information on the red/green underlining feature]

 You may encouter the problem that, when you create a Preference item like the Regional Options and you save them and immediately after that (or some time later) you open them, the settings you made are just reverted to the defaults. You may also have noticed that the settings don’t get saved in the export XML file you can create — and also that this happens to settings, that have those fancy red underlines:

This is a feature with Group Policy Preferences. The issue goes back to the days when MS took over the product and “customized” to fit it into Windows Server 2008 and Vista RSAT now. The underlining you see under the setting simply dictates whether the setting will be applied by a client or not. Red means “clients won’t get that setting” - green means “clients will get that setting”. To switch between green and red, you need to use the function keys F5-F8:

F5 - Mark all settings on the page as “green” (apply all)

F6 - Mark current setting as “green” (apply this setting)

F7 - Mark current setting as “red” (don’t apply this setting)

F8 - Mark all settings on the page as “red” (don’t apply).

When changing the color of the underline, you will see the settings get saved.

Posted in Group Policy

10 Comments so far

  1. Florian’s Blog » Date format in Regional Settings on January 15th, 2009

    […] http://www.frickelsoft.net/blog/?p=126 and here: http://www.frickelsoft.net/blog/?p=136 Posted in Group Policy […]

  2. Chris Adamantidis on May 14th, 2010

    You have no idea how many hours I just spent trying to figure this out.

    Thank you.

  3. Daniel on June 7th, 2010

    Handy stuff. This, and using F3 to bring up all available variables. Thankfully I learnt all of this at TechEd before I started trying to use GPP in earnest.

  4. Michael Crabtree on November 12th, 2010

    thank you SO much. this was kicking my butt over the last few days!

    i linked back to your site and reposted on my blog as well!

  5. Jesper M. Christensen on February 28th, 2011

    Thanks, this was exactly what I was looking for also. -you saved my day m8 :)

  6. Jason on April 14th, 2011

    I’ve been scratching my head for days wondering why this wasn’t working.

  7. sadheesh on January 23rd, 2013

    thaks this article helped me…

  8. Aaron on January 30th, 2013

    Thanks, just been going crazy for 1/2 an hour wondering why the settings don’t set.

  9. Alexandre Bernardes on February 20th, 2013

    Half a day looking for a solution, thanks

  10. Sobeck on March 7th, 2013

    That’s exactly what I was looking for.
    Thanks a lot.