Recycle Bin and Active Desktop Wallpaper

[sanity1977]

I've just spent about an hour and a half trying to understand why the policy settings I have set were not allowing an Active Desktop Wallpaper display. Here's what I did. Note: This is all for testing purposes only.

I changed the "Default Domain Policy" to "Enable - Remove Recycle Bin icon from desktop". This worked fine on it's own. I then created a new policy on my custom OU (Accounting) called "Set Accounting Wallpaper". In this policy I "Enabled - Active Desktop Wallpaper" and specified a UNC path called "\\server1\wallpaper\home.jpg" this path is correct and has full permissions etc. everything there is good. When I logged on as one of the accounting users the Recycle Bin is gone but the wallpaper would not display.

Ok ... I did a lot of research in this hour and a half trying to find out what the hell was going on and everyone is saying that Active Desktop needs to be enabled as well. I had set this allready but it still wouldn't work. I checked through all sorts of things that would have an affect on the wallpaper policy but I had only changed these two policies. As soon as I changed the "Default Domain Policy" back to "Not Configured - Remove Recycle Bin icon from desktop" the wallpaper works just how I would expect it to.

Why is this? I haven't put any service packs onto Win Server 2003 yet but I do have service pack 2 on the WinXP machine that the users are logging on with. Is it a known issue? I noticed in some of the descriptions of what each policy does that they mention when something will affect another policy for example the "Active Desktop Wallpaper" but theirs nothing on the Recycle Bin description.

Has anyone ever developed a small application or database with a listing of things that group policy can do and when one policy will affect another or am I being lazy and it's all provided for us allready. I'm using GPMC service pack 1 when changing policies by the way if that has anything to do with why this has happened.

Another quick question ... After sorting this all out I found that I didn't in fact need to have the policy for "Enable Active Desktop" set to "Enable". It still worked ever with it Disabled. Is this because I'm using WindowsXP and active desktop is enabled by default? That being the case would it only be necessary and wise to enable it just in case there are older windows operating systems being used within the domain?

Thanks in advance guys And I hope the above helps other people too.

[cluberti]

Welcome to one of the most annoying group policy settings ever - wallpaper. I've found that using anything but a .bmp results in fun for all - not sure why it would fail with the recycle bin removed, but if you change the .jpg to a .bmp and use that in your GPO, does it work when also removing the recycle bin?

[sanity1977]

Nope ... using a bitmap had no effect. Still had the same problem. I also tried removing the recycle bin in the OU policy instead of the "Default Domain Policy" and the same problem was evident. I tried a couple of other things too. I said previously that it didn't matter whether "Enable Active Desktop" was enabled or not that the .jpg file would still display, well that is still the case but if I use a .bmp file it will not work if "Enable Active Desktop" is not enabled. Even if I used a .bmp file and enabled "Allow only bitmapped wallpaper", using a .bmp file still required "Enable Active Desktop" to be enabled. Maybe because when you specify a .jpg file Windows automatically knows that Active Desktop needs to be enabled and does this itself.

Like you say the wallpaper thing is pretty screwed up from what I can see. I can't help but think that maybe I'm over looking something still. It just doesn't seem right somehow.