Wallpaper GPO fails on XP/2003 clients, works on 2008/Win 7 clients

[danbrown]

Hi all

This is my first post here, found the site by reading Jeremy's excellent GB books. I'm appealing to the community here in hopes that there is a fix for this as I've not been able to resolve it anywhere else.

I'm having a really hard time trying to do something very simple: apply a company standard wallpaper. I asked our marketing department to make a wallpaper which they did. I have it in .jpg format sitting in a shared folder that everyone has read access to. I created a new group policy called Wallpaper and set User\Policies\Adm Templates\Desktop\Desktop\Desktop Wallpaper with the path to the .jpg file I'd like to use. I should mention the DC is Server 2008 R2. The policy applies correctly to any OS running Win 7 or 2008. It fails on all of my 2003 servers and XP workstations resulting in a white screen. I've tried a wide variety of things to fix this like changing the Enable Active Desktop and Disable Active Desktop options (all combinations), using a .bmp file (can't do this permanently anyway as the file is too big), and manually changing this reg key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies/System/Wallpaper]

I've tried this technique from Microsoft but it also fails:

wallpaper image pops up then the screen turns white with icons only - Microsoft Answers

I've made certain the updated client side extensions are installed on all the 2003/xp clients and that they are actually getting the policy applied (it shows up properly under gpresults). There are no event log errors that would indicate what the problem is and I'm just about out of ideas.

If anyone could assist in getting this to work I would greatly appreciate it.

[danbrown]

Anyone at all?

[danbrown]

The silence in here is kind of sad...I notice many posts and very few replies. Oh well, it was worth a shot I guess.

[jeff_longley]

What happens if you use GPP to copy the file locally to the machine and set the policy to reference the local copy?

[sahil]

Hi Dan,
I am not an Expert, but for sure would like to assist you.
Please let me know if you still interested in resolving this & then we can take it from there.

Sahil