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Empowering Efficient IT

Using a GPO to disable the 'Windows XP tour' ballon

On OSD projects, many times one of the first image/desktop customization requests are:

Disable the Windows XP Tour balloon from popping up when domain users logon
At the logon prompt, have the Log on to drop-down set to a domain instead of the local computer name Note: I’m not going to blog about this one, as there is already a decent blog entryabout this by John Savill

Let's be honest, the "Windows XP Tour" balloon is just plain annoying!! After eight years, when was the last time you took “The Tour”?...Yup, my thoughts as well.

I’m all about customizing the OS deployment and making things pretty and simple. For most, the first option to implementing these customizations would be to script them as a reg-hack during the WIM reference build. It’s easy…but it’s static and requires modifying the Default User and/or Administrator account profile in the reference image. I’m from the school of thought: If at all possible, do not make any changes to the image other than installing the base OS and the latest hotfixes. I try to make all efforts to customizing the image during the actual deployment (e.g. not to the reference image) to the target computers as a reg-hack, or as a “post-deployment” managed configuration via Group Policy.

There is not a default group policy object to disabling Windows XP Tour for domain users when they logon. The good news is, I’ve gone ahead and created a group policy template file (.adm) that does this, which you can download and import into your environment. The template has been created and tested under a Windows Server 2003 AD forest/domain environment. If you are still running Windows 2000 AD, (haven’t tested it) I think it should still work. It definitely will not work for Windows Server 2008…

Well, let’s begin…

1. Download the Group Policy template file
2. Logon to a domain controller, and open Group Policy Management Console
3. Right-click the selected group policy object and select Edit Note: Either create a new group policy object or select an existing one
Note: Since the Windows XP Tour option is applied to domain users when they logon to a domain computer, you will be importing the template under User Configuration: 4. Under User Configuration, right-click Administrative Templates 5. Select Add/Remove Templates
6. Click the Add button and browse to the location you downloaded the .adm template to
7. Select the template-file and click the Open button
8. In the Add/Remove Templates dialog-box, click Close.
9. Under User Configuration, navigate to Administrative Templates -> System -> Configure Windows XP Tour Note: Since the Windows XP Tour options in the template are not "managed", you will not see the Windows XP Tour option in the right-pane. You will need to configure the Group Policy Object Editor so that it is able to show policy settings that are unmanaged.
10) In the Group Policy Editor, click View –> Filtering
11) …and then uncheck (DISABLE) Only show policy settings that can be fully managed and click OK
12) Navigate to Configure Windows XP Tour and you should now see the setting in the right-pane.
13) In the right-pane, double-click the setting Windows XP Tour: Number of logons that display a balloon prompt click Enabled and set RunCount value to 0 14) Click OK and close Group Policy Object Editor If not done already, don’t forget to apply the GPO to the desired OU.