Sorry to get to this topic late. If depends how you want to disable the GPO, from the admin/technician workstation side, which means disabling the GPO for every object to the OU it is applied in, or taking down one troublesome computer. We use link enabled GPO's, so this might be the clincher for you (and why you ought to use them). Check out this Technet document. As for the other way around, well, you do the equivalent of something I would do. I disconnect the computer from the network. I then remove the +H attribute off the %WinDir%\System32\GroupPolicy folder. Then, I just rename the folder, then run gpupdate /force. This obviously is a nasty kludge, but I often in my career had to quickly determine if GP was causing a configuration problem, an admin with button-mashing, a user, or a combo. This was a quick way to tell if GP was a culprit when I exhausted options. Might work for you, might not, and it is certainly not selective.