How To Keep Domain Group Policies from Applying to Administrator Accounts and Selected Users in Windows 2000

This step-by-step article describes how to keep domain group policies from also applying to administrator accounts and/or selected users. Windows 2000 uses group policies to control operating system behavior and security settings for users and computers in a Windows 2000 network, and group policies can be applied to either users and/or computers, at the site, domain, or organizational unit level.

Keeping Group Policies from Applying to Administrator Accounts

In most circumstances, if you want a group policy to apply only to specific accounts (either user accounts, machine accounts, or both), you can accomplish this by placing the accounts in an organizational unit, and then applying a group policy at that organizational unit level. However, there may be situations in which you want to apply a group policy to an entire domain, but you may not want those policy settings to also apply to administrator accounts or other specific users or groups. The following procedure can keep a group policy from applying to administrative accounts (or any other group or user account you specify) by editing the ACL (Access Control List) for the policy:

1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Active Directory Users and Computers.
2. In the left console tree, right-click the name of the domain to which the policy is applied, and then click Properties.
3. Click the Group Policy tab.
4. Click the group policy object that you do not want to apply to administrators. By default, the only policy that is listed in the window is the Default Domain Policy.
5. Click Properties, and then click the Security tab. If the group or user to which you do not want policies to apply does not appear in the list, use the following procedure:
   1. Click the Add button.
   2. Click the domain in which the account resides.
   3. Find the account, and then click it in the list.
   4. Click the Add button, and then click OK.
   5. Proceed with the remaining steps.
6. Click the administrators group (or other group or user) to which you do not want the policy to apply.
7. In the Permissions windows, click to select the Deny check box for the Apply Group Policy permission. This prevents the group policy object from being accessed and applied to the selected group or user account.For additional information about servers or workstations in a non-domain environment (workgroup), click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
   293655  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/293655/EN-US/ ) How to Apply Local Policies to all Users Except Administrators

For additional information about related topics, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: