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Forcing users to select a screensaver

I applied two Group Policies concerning screen savers. The first is "Password protect screen saver" the other is "Screen saver timeout". However, if a user sets the screen saver to "none" then the password protection is not applied after the specified timeout period has expired, making computers vulnerable. I could force a screen saver on the users but I'd like to allow them a choice of what to use. Is there a way to remove the option of none and still allow the users to select different screen savers?

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Within Windows 2000 Server there isn't a way to allow the selection and at the same time prevent them from selecting NONE as a choice. However, you could enable the policy as you have it and then use a login script to check that the choice is set. This won't be completely foolproof as any time after login a user could change it again. However, your script could check the SCRNSAVE.EXE registry key and if it is empty (no screen save) put a default in.

This was first published in August 2004

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