System time will not show

[glamprecht1]

Earlier today i specified in Group Policy to "remove Clock from System notification area" located in User administration\Administrative templets\Start Menu and Task Bar. This policy is applied to a local profile that many users share on a terminal server.

We now need to display the clock. So i set this to disable. For some reason the clock would not come back. I then set it to "not configured" and it still will not come back.

Is there some other setting in Group Policy that also controls the system time clock that shows up in the bottom right hand corner of Windows?

Any ideas as to how to get it back??

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[Dublin73]

When a user...

right clicks in the task bar
selects properties
ticks "Show the clock"

what happens?

 

[monsterjta]

glamprecht1,

Windows Terminal Services, by default, will not show the clock in the system tray while logged in with a regular user account. The clock will display when logged in remotely with an admin account, however.

There is a registry setting that can change this for users. But, consider the ramifications of using up bandwidth to dispay the system clock. It updates and acknowledes every minute for each session.

User configuration - Administrative templates - Start Menu and Taskbar
"Remove Clock from the system notification area"
but disabling this setting will not force the clock to display in the system tray, it will only allow users to enable the clock if they have access to the system tray on the Terminal Server. And in most situations, they haven't. To force the display of the clock in the taskbar, you will need to modify a setting in the registry. Start regedit and go to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StuckRects2
You'll see a "Settings" value, which contains something like this:

28 00 00 00 ff ff ff ff 02 00 00 00 03 00 00 00 6d 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 e0 03 00 00 00 05 00 00 00 04 00 00
The nineth pair of digits determines the Taskbar properties. Possible values are:

Always on top = 0x02
Auto hide = 0x01
Show small icons in Start menu = 0x04
Hide clock = 0x08
Combine the properties you want and set the byte. For example:

Always on top + Show small icons + Show clock = 06
Always on top + Show small icons + Hide clock = 0e
Note that the changes do not take effect immediately, you have to restart Explorer, or logoff and logon again to see the changes.

I hope you find this post helpful,

Jonathan Almquist
Minneapolis, MN

 

[glamprecht1]

Sorry that it took so long to reply.....

To answer Dublin73:
Group Policy is set to prevent right clicking. I did re-enable it just for kicks and was able to tell the profile to show the clock. It did appear but once I logged off and logged back on it would disappear again.
Thanks though!!

Monsterjta:
WOW!! That ended up doing the trick. Thank you so much. By the way is there some documentation that specifies what each pair of digits do? For example, my clock now shows when I set the 9th set of digits to "06" and overall I am very happy but I really did not want to use "small icons" no big deal but it would be nice to be able to show the clock with the regular sized icons in the start menu.

Thank you so much

Much appreciated!!!!