You might already know that Windows 2000 and XP SP2 are not supported by MS since the 13th of july 2010. As a consequence you cannot install new security patches released by MS on these platforms. A critical security vulnerability MS10-46 is corrected by the KB2286198 patch which was released the 3rd of august. This patch applies at least to Windows XP SP3 (for workstation versions) and Windows 2003 SP2 (for server versions). The KB article explains a workaround for the security patch, you need to edit two registry keys and disable a service.

You can apply this workaround on earlier version of Windows, if all your computers are not up to date. The disavdantage of this method is that icon images will disappear on some of your *.lnk files. So my advice is to upgrade as soon as possible your computers to a version which is supported by MS and apply the official security patch. Use the workaround only as last resort, the purpose of this post is to show you how to deploy this workaround with a GPO and play with WMI filtering. The Group Policy Center already wrote an article on how to deploy this workaround with GPO. We will just show you in this post how to target more precisely your computers which need the workaround by using WMI filers. We will achieve this under Windows 2008 by using Group Policy Preferences and activate the GPO workaround on the computers which have not the KB2286198 security patch installed. And we will show you how to achieve the same thing under AD 2003, without using Group Policy Preferences.
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We will explain in this post how to monitor GPO changes by tracking modifications on the GPT. Only deletion, computer/user configuration modification and creation can be overlooked. About GPO monitoring you can read this article,which shows you how to activate auditing on your Sysvol share \\domainname\sysvol\domainfqdn\Policies and retrieve GPO changes via the eventlog. We will use another method, taking advantage of the replication of this folder.
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Here is an application for your helpdesk that collects data about the user environment which can be useful for troubleshooting, It was developed using WMI code creator was really useful for coding this application.

Just click on the icon bellow to download the tool, if you notice any bugs and have any ideas for tool evolution, please do not hesitate to contact me.

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