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Thanks to fellow Group Policy MVP  Alan Burchill for warning about this–apparently if you install Internet Explorer 10 on your Windows 7 workstation, and you also happen to manage Group Policy from that machine, the IE 10 installation removes the option to edit IE Maintenance policy from that machine completely. I even confirmed that the MMC snap-in for managing IE Maintenance policy, called IEAKSIE.DLL, was indeed removed from my IE 10 enabled Windows 7 machine that I use for managing policy.  If you remember, I blogged about how Microsoft removed IE Maintenance Policy from Server 2012 and Windows 8 when it shipped those OS versions. I thought this was a good thing at the time, but it did leave folks that had heavily deployed IE Maintenance policy in the lurch when they needed to edit those GPOs from a Windows 8 or Server 2012 machine. But this latest change is just downright stupid, as it forces IT administrators to either forgo IE 10 as an upgrade on their administrative workstations, or forgo being able to manage IE Maintenance policy going forward. And, if they warned us about it, they weren’t very vocal about it.

I guess I’ll be de-installing IE 10 tonight…

Such a poorly communicated and unfortunate move, if it proves to have no work-around other than removing IE 10, is just silly.

EDIT: It’s important to point out here, as I’m reminded by one of the comments below, that when you install IE 10, you are removing both the MMC snap-ins to edit IE Maintenance Policy from that machine, as well as the Client Side Extensions for processing IE Maintenance Policy. So any workstations that have IE 10 will neither be able to create/edit nor receive IE Maintenance settings. I wanted to clarify that.

 

 

Darren