Bypassing Group Policy in an Enterprise environment, so you can get your job done
Over the years I've become accustomed to working on locked down Windows machines. As a developer, it's sometimes necessary to remove the group policy imposed by your I.T. department. Don't misunderstand me though, group policies play an important role in keeping enterprise machines sanitary, but as a developer, group policy can really f**k around with your development environment.
GPCul8r
GPCul8r is a dirty little program for bypassing group policy restrictions under Windows. It s not technically novel or interesting, but it's handy to have if you need to operate within a domain-joined desktop environment that's subject to group policy controls. The original .zip and article seem to have disappeared from the Internet now, so here's my mirror of GPCul8r-0.1.zip.
How to install:
1. Copy GPCul8r.dll and detoured.dll to a permanent location.
2. Use withdll.exe to launch regedit.exe with GPCul8r.dll & detoured.dll mapped into its process space as follows:
c:\> withdll /p:<full pathname of detoured.dll> /d:<full pathname of gpcul8r.dll> regedit.exe
3. Edit HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\AppInit_DLLs, adding both GPCul8r.dll and detoured.dll to the list of DLL's.
That should do it. Note that if you don't have admin rights, you won't be able to perform this last step - sorry. You'll still be able to launch individual programs using GPCul8r as described in step #2, but if you want GPCul8r to be loaded automatically by all applications, you're on your own.
Security Administrator
GPCul8r is a great way to bypass the group policy block on unauthorised programs, and can be used to start Security Administrator - a fantastic tool for removing the group policy registry entries in 3 clicks.
Security Administrator isn't free, but it can be used for 30 days without limitation. It's so handy, it's one of things I keep on my USB drive for quick access.