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Terminal Server 2003 issues with Group Policy Preferences History Folder

  • Article

We have heard some customer issues around one of the underpinning areas of Group Policy Preferences – namely the History Folder.

Issue

On Windows Server 2003 Terminal Servers with a large number of users, the history folder grows so large it causes increasing slow logons for the users.

What does the History folder do anyway??

The history folder is there to maintain actions such as “Remove this item when it is no longer applied”. If we don’t do this then we can’t roll back correctly. So the short of it is that we expect the folder size to grow. What we don’t want occurring is that it slows down logons. The reason this issue is occurring is because of history management that is occurring at logon.

What are you gonna do about it?

The CSE update in KB974266 fixes this issue and removes the core customer impact issue of slow logon.

The second issue is the folder size itself growing. If you are finding it is growing excessively, the correct action to take on Terminal Servers is to periodically execute a script, say every six months, to purge out entries older than six months to keep the file size down – which really shouldn’t be getting that big anyway.

Hope this helps

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Janson - Its in here: All UsersAppdataMicrosoftGroup PolicyHistory

  • Anonymous
    October 29, 2009
    Hi Michael - thankyou for the information - where does the history folder 'live'?  What is its name? Thanks Janson

  • Anonymous
    October 30, 2009
    Hi Many thanks, I'll go check that out on our W2K3 X64 Citrix farm.  We are using GPP for printer deployment, folder options settings and custom shortcuts Cheers Janson