phirebird » terminal server

Hide Run option from the Start Menu

shands — Sat, 16 May 2009 11:00:15 +0000

Another useful tweak (especially useful for terminal server environments!) is the ability to hide the Run option from the Start Menu. Start registry editor and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Create a new DWORD value and set it to 1.

Prevent viewing of drives through Internet Explorer

shands — Sat, 16 May 2009 10:51:07 +0000

I’ve already covered how to hide local drives from My Computer (and common dialog boxes). But, you might want to also crack down on users circumventing this by typing the drive letter into an Internet Explorer window to get access to them.

Navigate to the key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Create a DWORD value and name it NoFileURL. Set it to 1 (which means that drives can not be viewed with IE)

You might also consider hiding the Run menu option too (which I’ll have another dig around for!)

Hide drives from My Computer

shands — Sat, 16 May 2009 10:32:39 +0000

Here’s how to hide drive letters from within My Computer. When users open My Computer from the desktop, they will see an icon for each drive on the system. With the following Registry change, you can hide these icons, preventing users from finding them and using them.

Why would you want to do this? Well, apart from the obvious shifty method of hiding your stuff, it’s VERY useful in terminal server environments where you want to hide the potentially sensitive system drives, local floppy disk or CD-ROM drives. Not so silly now, eh? Remember that you can still access these drives by typing the drive letter directly (for instance in an Open/Save/Run dialog box). I’ll dig out another tweak later to show how to crack down on this too!

Open Registry Editor and navigate to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Create a DWORD value and name it NoDrives. As for it’s value, you’ll need to work it out depending on what drives you wish to hide. Simply add them together from the following list. The total is what you’ll use for the the NoDrives value.

A=1
B=2
C=4
D=8
E=16
F=32
G=64
H=128
I=256
J=512
K=1024
L=2048
M=4096
N=8192
O=16384
P=32768
Q=65536
R=131072
S=262144
T=524288
U=1048576
V=2097152
W=4194304
X=8388608
Y=16777216
Z=33554432

For examply, if you want to hide drives A, C and D the value would be 13 (1 + 4 + 8).

Please make sure that you backup your registry BEFORE carrying out this modification, etc, etc, etc!