Disable the task manager for me :)

MarkyMark · 7 Jul 2006 at 11:44

Ok, I can actually disable the task manager so that it is greyed out when pressing ctrl+alt+del using gpedit.msc. However, this disables it for everyone. Is there a way to disable it only for XP users and not administrators on a local system?

Cheers in advance

Trigger · 7 Jul 2006 at 20:31

Simple answer is 'no'. Not without a domain

|Ric| · 7 Jul 2006 at 20:50

what about simply changing the permissions on it? Only give admins the right to open it?

|Ric| · 7 Jul 2006 at 20:54

another possibility with permissions, go to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

If there are no entries in that folder then you could add:
a DWORD "DisableTaskMgr"
Set it to a value of 1 to disable task manager then deny admins read access to the whole of the System key.
You can't set it only on the DWORD unfortunately so if there are other DWORDs in it this will stop them being read.

Ric.

Trigger · 7 Jul 2006 at 22:46

|Ric| said:
what about simply changing the permissions on it? Only give admins the right to open it?

Yeah, really good idea... lets start playing with permissions on task manager... I think not. Policies are designed to make removing the task manager from view safe- to apply to only certain user groups would require a domain environment. Simple

|Ric| · 8 Jul 2006 at 10:09

Well if you actually looked at the registry solution, that is a nice clean way to essentially apply policy to only certain users.
Yes it is not ideal if you need to apply other policies in there and have them applying to all different groups of users per setting, but if you only want to set this it achieves exactly what he wants and its "safe"

Ric.

n.b. changing the properties on taskmgr is pretty view safe as windows fails silently, unless you try and explicitly open the file and then you get an access denied. It is a perfectly adequate solution.