Overriding Group Policy on a Windows Domain

This requires already having local administrative access on the machine. To get that, see my very detailed post on that.

So you have local admin access on your Windows domain machine, but Group Policy settings are still getting in your way. Fortunately, since you're now on the nice side of Raymond Chen's airtight hatchway, you own the machine and can do something about this.

The Group Policy cache is located in parts of the registry that anybody can read but only administrators can modify. See these keys:

• HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies (actually Local Security Policy)
• HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies
• HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies

Entries under there (you might have to look through some subfolders) are set in the Group Policy or Local Security Policy dialogs. Since you probably don't have access to the domain server, you'll have to make your changes here to override Group Policy.

Simply find entries whose names obviously correspond to annoying restrictions, then set them to something (usually zero) that disables them. You can find explanations of the more cryptic keys in this TechNet article and the articles it links to.

Once you finish making changes, reboot the computer or at least re-login to make sure you're using the newest settings. Oh, and I should mention that it would be a good idea to back up the registry keys before doing something like this.