controlling non-admin account

I just noticed, you're using win7 RC. That edition is time bombed, it'll expire on June1. After that, it'll be virtually unusable. I hope you have planned to acquire RTM before that.

hmm... this is good but ideally i would like to use the group policy editor. is it possible to use the management console to do this?

blocking access to programs is one the things i want to achieve along with things like custom homepages, disable windows update, etc. which are all available in the group policy editor

@Bill2.. i'm using windows 7 final now.. hadn't updated the thing in the forums

Well, as far as Regedit and Command Prompt are concerned, the most convenient way would be to set them to run as administrator. Obviously for this you need to have a password protected admin account. Login to your Standard user account, right click on on each exe, then check the box labelled run as administrator. It'll prompt you for your admin credentials. Of course the admin user will also be required to enter the admin credentials but thats a small price to pay. Turning these off in gpedit will, afaik, turn them off for all users.

Try doing this, then get back so we know whether it works. We'll go ahead from there.

that worked but i think i found a better solution. i went to the microsoft management console and added a new group policy object snap-in. when the "select group policy object" window opened i selected browse ---> users ---> non-administrators. then i enabled all the group policies i wanted and they were applied to the standard account, not the administrator account, like i wanted.

the only problem i have now is that if i open the management console again.. the snap-in is not visible under the console root. this means that i wont be able to revert the changes i made if need be. is there a solution to this?

I noticed that once the file was saved and then deleted.. the account still had the restrictions that i had set but when i open up gpedit.msc the settings concerned were in their default state. so in this case if the saved file is deleted.. i don't see anyway of reverting the changes i originally made to the standard account.

this is a big problem for me because.. the computer is my friends laptop and i need to be able to revert the settings should something not work as my friend intended it to.

once i have used the mmc snap-in and configured the group policies i cannot revert the changes regardless of if i have the mmc file or not. if i then go to gpedit.msc and make the same settings, they are applied system wide as expected.