Following the installation of the September 2022 updates, many users are complaining of issues with GPOs that create shortcuts. Microsoft just released official workarounds.
The September 2022 updates have been available since Tuesday, September 13, 2022, in particular update KB5017308 for Windows 10. A bug concerns group policies in an Active Directory environment, especially when you want to create a shortcut by GPO: this one is not created, or else it is created, but it is empty. Annoying.
At first, this malfunction related to group policies seemed to affect only Windows 10, but quickly, users noticed this bug on other versions of Windows. The information published by Microsoft also goes in this direction since the American company affirms that This bug affects Windows from Windows 8.1 to Windows 11 22H2, and server versions from Windows Server 2008 SP2 to Windows Server 2022.
While waiting for a reaction from Microsoft, system administrators found that it was enough to uncheck the option “Run in user’s security context” on the GPOs concerned in order to troubleshoot shortcut creation issues. In addition, other administrators have taken a more radical decision: remove the September 2022 update, in this case update KB5017308 if we take the example of Windows 10. A solution to avoid in order to stay protected against the latest security patches.
Official Microsoft Workarounds
Microsoft has posted official workarounds, which are:
- Uncheck the option “Run in user’s security context” in the GPO, but it does not work on elements that use the wildcard “*”
- Change the application mode using the action “Update” instead of “Replace“
- If a wildcard
is used in the location or destination, removing the “” (backslash) in the destination may allow the copy to succeed
Attention, do not apply all the instructions above, but only alone: it is an “OR” not an “AND”! ?
A final patch should be released as soon as possible by Microsoft.