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When you open the Group Policy Editor in Windows XP Professional, some of the categories under Administrative Templates may be missing. For example when you expand Administrative Templates, the System category may be missing. This article provides information on how to restore the missing folders to the Group Policy Editor.
Add the Missing ADM File
Method 1
1. Open the Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc)
2. Expand Computer Configuration
3. Right-click Administrative Templates, and click Add/Remove Templates…
4. Click Add…
5. Select the file system.adm and click Open
6. Click Close.
Method 2
Using Windows Explorer, copy the file system.adm from the C:\Windows\INF folder to C:\Windows\system32\GroupPolicy folder. In a standard Windows XP installation, the target folder has the following ADM files by default:
- conf.adm
- inetres.adm
- wmplayer.adm
- wuau.adm
- system.adm
Copying the missing file from the ADM folder should restore the missing folder in the Group Policy Editor. If that does not work, make sure that filtering is turned off.
Turn Off Filtering
1. Expand Computer Configuration, and select Administrative Templates
2. From the View menu, click Filtering…
3. Uncheck the following checkboxes:
- Filter by Requirements information
- Only show configured Policy settings
4. Click OK.
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ohhh my godd! finally i can solve this!, thanks to youu
Thank you so much for this answer!!!! I talked to five people at Dell’s tech support and was on hold for a very long time hoping for answer to this problem. While on hold I found your answer via google.
Found the solution to my previously mentioned problem.
I had changed the path in the TMP environment variable to C:\TEMP, but did not create the directory. When the group policy editor runs it creates an xml file at the location specified in the variable. If it cannot create the temporary file it fails to display many of the features.
Thanks, well done article
[...] once I found the right question to ask Google. Thanks to Ramesh Srinivasan at Winhelponline.com for Restore Missing Folders to the Group Policy Editor in Windows XP. Basically, highlight a primary category, go to add/remove templates, then select [...]
This is perfect, thanks.
Its fantastic & great!!!
Thanks
Template files on a computer I am working on setting up magically went missing and this method restored them perfectly.
Does anyone have any idea why they went missing?
I used a fresh install of XP, with a gui assisted unattended install and then ran all of the windows updates, and missing dell drivers.
Any insight into the source of the problem would be appreciated
very nice method, thanks so much
It’s new and great.
thanks.