Wallpaper Blues

Sometimes as a network administrator you have the un-daunting task of trying to lockdown user systems, with one of the most annoying problems that arise is someone switching the corporate wallpaper to something else. In some instances the corporate wallpaper is a requirement for keeping some sort of uniformity on all of the PC’s in the office. There is nothing worse than one of your executives walking through the office and seeing some employees PC screen with the image of some blood and guts movie poster. Or a client walking through and seeing their competitions logo on a marketing members screen. In order to restrict this Wallpaper swapping as I like to call it, you will need to have some kind of restrictions on the PC in order to keep users from gaining access to the location. The minimum restriction that you would need is to block viewing access to system files and folders, this can be done by opening up windows explorer using your windows key plus E (Windows+E) or if you don’t have a keyboard with the windows key on it. Go to start-run and type explorer. Once in explorer you can go to tools on the menu bar, and then select folder options. Once you are in the folder options dialog box, select the view tab. Under the view tab you will see a section labeled “Advanced Settings”, move to this section and in Files and Folders make sure that “Do not show files and folders” radio button is selected and that “Hide protected operating system files” checkbox is marked.

Once you have made sure that you at least have the minimum resources covered to keep your users from gaining access to specific locations of their PC’s you can now restrict the changing of the wallpaper.

Step 1: Make sure you have your corporate wallpaper handy and ready for use. Make sure that it is a .BMP file. If you do not have a corporate wallpaper but would still like to restrict users from making changes, create or choose a .BMP file that you want to standardize on and have it ready.

Step 2: Open the folder C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ (%username% is the user’s directory name)

Step 3: Copy your .BMP file to this location and rename it to “Internet Explorer Wallpaper” leave the file extension unchanged. (if there is already a file in this directory by this name, delete it).

Step 4: Once you have copied the file over, right mouse click the file and go to properties and mark it read only.

Step 5: In order for this process to be complete you will need to log off and back on.

After you have completed the steps above the user will not be able to right mouse click on a .JPG or .BMP and select make desktop wallpaper. However you also need to make sure that you restrict access from changing wallpapers on the local machine. There is a number of ways to do this; however that will be left for another time. Most of these setting can be done in the group policy editor on the local machine or you can setup group policies using your DC.

WRD

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