Windows 7, GPPs, mapped drives and shortcuts

[sparkeh]

So, just thought I would share this experience in case it helps anyone in the future.

 

Turns out that due to a bug (that appears to date back to 2009) in Windows 7 you can't use GPPs to distribute shortcuts to drive that are mapped by GPP.

The following Technet thread discusses this and appears to be where Googling this issue always ends up but didn't solve my particular issue:

GPP Shortcuts using Mapped Drive Paths

 

We have just had a visitor system installed and the management console for the system resides on the signing in machine (lets call it PC1). To access the console you need to map a drive (lets say X:\) to \\PC1\system and create shortcuts to X:\Console.exe and X:\EvacuationList.exe

So rather than limit to particular machines I wanted the shortcuts to follow the users who should have access to the console - GPPs right? So I added the X: mapping and the shortcuts to the correct policies and targeted them at a security group. Logged on to a XP machine and everything worked, Windows 7 however gave me the dreaded

[b]'0x80070002 The system cannot find the file specified.'[/b]

Dammit.

 

After much Googling I found the above thread and tried some of the suggestions. Irritatingly setting the shortcut as a shell object didn't work as I needed to add the 'Start in' option to say X:\ as without this the console didn't function correctly. You can't set the 'Start in' option in GPP shortcuts when they are shell objects for some reason.

 

So to fix this I put the correct shortcuts in a server share \\\networkApps and pointed the GPP shortcuts at these. Logged into a Win 7 machine and all worked correctly.

Now the slightly odd bit. When I examined the console shortcut I expected it to point to \\\networkApps\Console.exe but no, it was pointing at X:\Console.exe

I guess that the shortcuts as resolved to their final destination which is a nice touch.

 

Hope that helps someone some day.

Edited May 25, 2012 by sparkeh

[siuko]

Sorry for the necro....

 

But THAAAAAAAAAAAANK YOU @sparkeh

 

This works great and has stopped my random shortcuts working / not working!!

 

Taaaa

[sparkeh]

No worries, glad it helped

 

Now revist this thread I realised I now have something to add to this.

 

You can also set shortcuts to be URLs which has an advantage.

 

So, another scenario I tried was to mapped a drive with GPPs, then add a desktop shortcut to that drive with GPPs. This (usually) fails with Windows 7 and ordinary shortcuts as the path is checked, for some reasons it can't find the path and errors (even if the GPP to map the drive run before the shortcut GPP).

However, if the shortcut is a URL (eg X:\) the path is not checked, the shortcut is created regardless so by the time the user clicks the shortcut, it works.