Disable drap and drop in windows

[machin05]

Hey all, hope you are all well and recovering from the "most depressing day of the year"!

I want to be able to prevent staff and students (well everyone really) from dragging and dropping folders. We have a problem here where staff accidentally drag, for instance, the Maths folder into the Music folder. It happens with the students in their user areas too.

I don't want to prevent people from copying folders, if that's what they want to do, as we are trying to promote rationalised file structures.

Ideally I would like them to still be able to Right Click > Copy and Right Click > Paste but not be able to drag folders.

I've had a search but all I can find is disbaling drag and drop for the start menu.

Has anyone got a solution to this?

Cheers,
Will

I forgot to mention, our workstations are Windows XP Pro on a 2000 Domain

[Bezwick]

As far as i know there is no way of disabling drag n drop in XP through group policy. However this registry hack should do the trick after a reboot.

Save this as a .reg file and it should work.

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
"DragHeight"="999999"
"DragWidth"="999999"



or like this for a .vbs file (Can be deployed easily with group policys)

Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
On error Resume Next

WSHShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\DragHeight", 999999
WSHShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop\DragWidth", 999999

Hope that helps

Oh and PS - This reg fix disables all forms of dragging and dropping so be aware that if you like to move the icons around on your desktop - tough - although if you have a lot of time on your hands you could try altering the values and seeing if you can reach a compromise.

[machin05]

Thanks for the reply Beswick

I found something similar to this but I believe the major drawback is that you cannot then drag any windows on screen.

EDIT: Sorry, didn't read your whole post!

Any other ideas out there?

[Bezwick]

Understood,
Then I can only guess as i haven't tried it but in theory it may work.

If you remove the delete permission from the folder, it should theoretically prevent it from being moved only copied. With the default action of dragging and dropping being move (within the same volume) and accidental drag and drop should just produce an error.

Sorry if this doesnt work its only a guess i have never tried it.

Good luck

[pooley]

Understood,
Then I can only guess as i haven't tried it but in theory it may work.

If you remove the delete permission from the folder, it should theoretically prevent it from being moved only copied. With the default action of dragging and dropping being move (within the same volume) and accidental drag and drop should just produce an error.

Sorry if this doesnt work its only a guess i have never tried it.

Good luck

Does work but be careful, MS office (mostly Publisher) will not save to a folder with the Delete permission removed.

[machin05]

I'd already removed the delete permissions from the folder out of which folders may have been dragged, tested but it still moved the folder!?

I don't really won't to deny delete for the network as it's encouraged that staff and student delete data that they no longer need to save the server filling up with stagnent files.

[Bezwick]

Hmmm yeah that makes sense as a lot of the office programs create temp files in the foldwer they are opened in. And if delete permissions were denied your folders could fill up rapidly with .tmp files.

Sorry mate i am out of ideas then.

Does work but be careful, MS office (mostly Publisher) will not save to a folder with the Delete permission removed.

[Michael]

There is a drag and drop policy relating to the Start Menu but I am unsure (top of my head) whether this stops it within Explorer too.

User Config > Admin Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar

Remove Drag-and-Drop context menus on the Start Menu