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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9 Comments

  1. Lisa
    said this on Monday, January 2nd 2012 10:07 pm

    Thank you SO very much!

  2. x
    said this on Wednesday, September 7th 2011 6:05 pm

    thanx a LOT!!! You rock! :-)

  3. Sugunakar
    said this on Tuesday, August 23rd 2011 9:46 pm

    Thank you.,
    Method 1 worked out

  4. Sinisa
    said this on Wednesday, June 8th 2011 5:06 pm

    Thanks a lot. Saved lot of time finding what is wrong with group policy.

  5. agnes
    said this on Monday, May 9th 2011 9:11 pm

    thank u it helped a LOT..

  6. April
    said this on Thursday, November 18th 2010 10:07 pm

    What if you are missing the whole administrative templates folder? How do I get that back?

  7. Charlie
    said this on Tuesday, October 19th 2010 5:49 am

    This was just what I needed thank you very much.

  8. Leto
    said this on Friday, October 1st 2010 12:14 pm

    perfect!

  9. Helen
    said this on Tuesday, October 6th 2009 9:44 pm

    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.

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