Security Policies - Wasn't me !

[dbatlmu]

For some reason my Win2k installation is now applying security policies on boot-up and I don't remember setting any policies up.
At one stage it was taking as long as 15 minutes to apply these policies, so I deleted a Local Policy folder I fgound and now we're down to 1-2 minutes !
What are these security policies, how did they start ( there's only me on this PC and I'm the Admin! ) and how do I stop it running at start-up ?
Dave

 

[ianf]

W2K will always apply security policy at boot time. It always has since you installed it and it will always continue to apply the security policy. It is not something that you should disable. It is fairly fundamental to the OS.

If there is only one user/admin and it is a non-domain PC, the security policy will be doing very little. But what it does do is run the password validation, the user rights and permissions. W2K is not like 98 or 95, you cannot cancel the password validation and still get in.

The policy is taking a long time to apply (where it didn't before), but if you have installed nothing new, not altered the policies or generated a massively tiered directory tree, it would be difficult to narrow the problem down without looking at the security logs (assuming that the security logging has been enabled).

Ian

"IF" is not a word it's a way of life

 

[dbatlmu]

May be so, but it never announced it in a splash screen as per the 'Windows is starting' before, and I don't get it on any of my Win2K PCs at work.
All three PCs are set up the same way and to the same level of Updates - so why is this one announcing it and the other two don't?
Dave

 

[Meldric]

Dave
It takes less then 10 seconds on my work computer with domain level security policies to also apply. It is entirely possible that you are just not seeing the security policy apply at work, but I assure you Ian is correct in saying that they always apply and should not be disabled.

Roger

 

[jrjuiliano]

In any case you should go through the local security policy settings on your box and notice what is being allowed and what is not. It's actually very interesting to see all the choices made.

This would apply for a stand-alone machine; if you were a machine attached to a Win 2k server clients would get local policies through through domain master.

Is is possible that the master 'list' of the security settings got messed up, so that deleting them actually just reset the settings to default (thereby making it faster to load)? J.R. Juiliano
Information Systems Specialist
Tri-City Emergency Medical Group