domain user disabling screensaver
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RASG
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Published on 2012-03-08T19:48:07Z
Indexed on
2012/04/05
11:31 UTC
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I have the following situation:
Due to security reasons the screensaver is activated after 10 minutes, and immediately locks the screen.
There are GPOs preventing the user from changing the screensaver parameters and the background image.
In order to bypass the background policy, some users are using bginfo
The problem is that for some reason now the screensaver doesn't work anymore.
The settings are still the same (10 minutes; locked to the user) and comparing snapshots of the registry before and after executing bginfo doesn't show any significant modification.
Any hints?
EDIT 1:
Ok, i figured whats going on, but now i have another question.
bginfo refreshes the user settings by reading HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
, which has ScreenSaveActive
.
If the user set it to 0, disables the screensaver.
Why isnt HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Control Panel\Desktop
, which sets ScreenSaveActive
to 1, being enforced?
or if it is being enforced, where is bginfo storing the value 0, and how can it bypass the policy?
EDIT 2:
I also discovered that after setting any value to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\ScreenSaveActive
, it can be deleted and the last value will remain active.
For some reason HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Control Panel\Desktop\ScreenSaveActive
value is not being enforced to the user.
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