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Server 2012 – Remove Network Icon from File Explorer Navigation Pane via Group Policy

After much research, some poking around in the registry, and a little dumb luck, I’ve discovered a way to disable the Network icon from the left side of the File Explorer navigation pane on a PER USER basis using Group Policy Registry Preferences.

Basically, I borrowed the concept from other posts and made it work for the current user profile. One problem that I ran into trying to use the HKLM key was that I couldn’t update the key using the SYSTEM account via Group Policy and I didn’t want to manually edit registry permissions on a bunch of RDS Servers. On top of that, more importantly, I didn’t want to disable the Network icon for my administrator accounts too! So here’s what you need to do… Continue reading “Server 2012 – Remove Network Icon from File Explorer Navigation Pane via Group Policy”

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Classic Shell – Registry Entries for Custom Windows 7 Style Start Menu

When applying the Classic Shell Group Policy Templates in Windows 2012 RDS, there is an option called “Menu items for the Windows 7 Style”. In order to customize the menu items, you first need to make changes to some user profile that is using Classic Shell and then go and retrieve the entries from the HKCU\Software\IvoSoft\ClassicStartMenu\Settings\MenuItems7 key in the Registry to know what to enter there. Even on the Classic Shell forums, they didn’t have it documented so here goes…

First, you should have a list of entries titled “Items(1-23).Command=” followed by the friendly name of the item.

Item1.Command=user_files

Following each one of those entires, you may or may not have an additional entry for each item titled “Items(1-23).Settings=” followed by one or more of the display options depending on how you want it displayed.

Item1.Settings=NOEXPAND

As of Classic Shell version 4.1, here is a list of the Command names and their descriptions:

admin - %AppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Administrative Tools
 Continue reading "Classic Shell – Registry Entries for Custom Windows 7 Style Start Menu"
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Batch Script – Sending Items to the Recycle Bin Without Calling Any Third-Party Applications

While writing another larger script, I wanted the ability to send folders or files to the Recycle Bin, which I found out you can’t do natively via the command line without using some third-party apps or PowerShell.

I also found that when looping through a list of files in a batch script, it makes it really difficult to delete folders versus files because you have to either use the “del” command for files or the “rmdir” command for folders. With no simple way to differentiate between the two without a bunch of extra code, I kept looking for an alternative solution.
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Batch Script – Zip/Compress Files Without Calling Any Third-Party Applications

While writing another batch script the last several days, I found out that you cannot zip or compress files or folders natively from the command line without having additional third-party software or PowerShell. After a while of scouring the forums, I came up with this pure batch solution that uses VB script.

Basically, from this chunk of code in a single batch file, we can both generate the VB script, zip up whatever files we want, and then just delete the VB script when we’re done. Within the batch file, we can just call on the VB script using “CScript” and it works pretty much like any other function in any other programming language.
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Batch Script – Get User’s SID One-Liner

While researching a way to try and send files to a user’s Recycle Bin from a batch script, I came across this one liner either at StackExchange or SuperUser forums somewhere. FYI, there is no way natively to send something to the trash without using a VB script or some third party utility. Yes you can physically move the files into the C:\$Recycle.Bin\<UsersSID> folder, but the files will not show up in Explorer and won’t be removed when you empty the trash that way.
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Windows 8.1 – Disable IPv6 Components

While trying to troubleshoot some issues with a user’s flaky VPN connection (they could get connected but couldn’t ping anything on the company network), my first guesses were that it was either a routing issue and that IPv6 might be the culprit or that it could be an MTU issue. In searching for the answers on how to disable IPv6, I had stumbled across a blog article that, while seemingly helpful at the time, had some misleading information on it that caused some rather undesirable results. It gave me an incorrect registry value setting of “0xffffffff” that actually caused Windows to take an extra five seconds to boot.
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Windows Explorer – Cannot Read From the Source File or Disk

Sometimes when users on a Mac manipulate files on a Windows network share, files get left with missing attributes where there is no security tab in the properties, you cannot take ownership of the files nor can you delete them and you get an error message that states “Cannot delete file: Cannot read from the source file or disk.”.
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