Monday, January 26, 2009

Force Group Policy to refresh on a Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP machine

A. To manually force Group Policy to refresh under Windows 2000, you use the command

secedit /refreshpolicy

Microsoft has replaced this command in Windows 2003 and XP with the command

gpupdate

You can run this command without any switches to update both machine and user policies. When you run Gpupdate on Windows 2003, the machine will display the following text:
Refreshing Policy...

User Policy Refresh has completed.
Computer Policy Refresh has completed.

To check for errors in policy processing, review the event log.

The last line doesn't appear on XP machines. To update only the user command components, type
gpupdate /target:user

To load only the computer command components, type
gpupdate /target:computer

The optional switches that you can use with the Gpupdate command are
/Force. This switch loads all policy settings rather than just those that have changed.
/Wait:

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