Group Policy Editor restricting my administrator account?

Question

Hi I have created a problem on my PC and now I feel really stupid. I tried to restrict access to certain programs on a recently created standard user account via "gpedit.msc". After completing the list of programs I wanted the particular account to have access to, it has now also applied that to my administrator account. I am using win 7 pro x64.

I cannot access anything except 4 programs that were on the list, everything else I try to do gets denied. I cannot even get back in the group policy editor (gpedit.msc) as I get this error:

"This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please Contact your system administrator."

I am the system admin, I do not get it? I literally cannot do a thing or open a thing. What do i do? I feel so stupid I've basically locked myself out of my own computer. I followed what it said on this link How-To-Geek.

Please help!!

Solution

I was able to find the answer after some searching around, this answer is from this question in Server Fault, posted by San Jac.

I had the same issue by accidentally changing system settings in gpedit. Try this fix I got from Greylox.... It worked for me.

1. Open "Run" & enter %systemroot%\system32\GroupPolicy\User

2. Delete registry.pol (if it exists).

3. Go to %systemroot%\system32\GroupPolicy\Machine and delete registry.pol (if it exists).

4. Reboot your system.

5. Log in using your administrator account & create a new administrator account.

6. Reboot the computer & login as under new administrator account.

7. Open "Run" & enter gpedit.msc

8. Go to "Local Computer Policy" → "User Configuration" → "Administrative Templates" → "system" → "Run only specified Windows applications" (as shown below) & disable it.

9. Run gpupdate /force and login with your old administrator account.

Comments

[Sylvoo]

I cannot use notepad or anything of that nature. Gives me the same error "This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please Contact your system administrator". However i created the file via Visual Studio as that was one of the applications I left approved. I create the script and cannot run it as i get the same access denied error :(

[clhy]

You cannot even open command prompt ?

[clhy]

What is the fix....do you want to post an answer !

[Freedo]

It would be nice to know how to prevent this from happening again. Adding gpedit.msc to the whitelist doesn't work