WINDOWS 2000 PROFESSIONAL

CONTROL THE START MENU AND TASKBAR WITH GROUP POLICIES

The Windows Start menu and taskbar provide quick access to a variety of applications and services, some of which you might not want readily available to your users. For example, you might want to remove the Run or Help commands from the Start menu, prevent Windows from keeping a document history, or configure Windows to clear the document history when the user exits. You can accomplish these types of tasks through group policy.

To view the policies you can configure for the Start menu and taskbar, open the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), and add the Group Policy console for the local computer. Or open a group policy object from the Active Directory Users And Computers console on a server.

Navigate to User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Start Menu & Taskbar. This branch contains more than 20 policies that remove features from the Start menu and disable functions such as drag-and-drop context menus on the Start menu. To view more information about a particular policy, double-click the policy, and select the Explain tab.

The Start menu is the main location most users go to access applications and resources on their computers. Controlling what they see in the Start menu can go a long way toward keeping them out of trouble.