If a user group contains more than 500 users, the hair color of the "person" icon for the group changes to gray. This does not affect the functionality of the group or the users for whom the hair color of the icon changes. This issue affects built-in groups, local groups, and global groups.

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Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
Windows must query for the class type of each group member to assign an icon. This query can take a long time as groups grow in size; this is the reason for the default limit.

You can override this behavior in the registry. To do so, modify the GroupMemberQueryLimit REG_DWORD entry in the following registry subkey:The default value is 500. You can change this value to any value that you want to use.

Note The Windows key and the Directory UI subkey may not exist. Create these subkeys if necessary.

Also, the size of the query for member class types is set by the GroupMemberFilterCount REG_DWORD entry in the same registry subkey. This entry defaults to 35 members per query. You can change this value to change the number of members that are returned by a query.

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Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

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