GPO Deployed Desktop Shortcuts Deleted After Logon

Recently at work, I have been involved on a project that has used GPO to lock down End User Devices and also deploy shortcuts to the users desktops.

As we wanted the shortcuts to display for all users we decided to publish the shortcuts to the public desktop. All was going well until we started to lock down the EUD’s more. After a gpupdate /force our shortcuts disappeared. After spending some time troubleshooting it turned out that the following GPO setting was the cause.

User Configuration/Policies/Administrative Tools/Start Menu and Taskbar/Remove common program groups from start menu

The policy description does not even mention that this might happen. Here is the policy description:

[themify_quote]
Removes items in the All Users profile from the Programs menu on the Start menu.
By default, the Programs menu contains items from the All Users profile and items from the user’s profile. If you enable this setting, only items in the user’s profile appear in the Programs menu.
Tip: To see the Program menu items in the All Users profile, on the system drive, go to ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs.
[/themify_quote]
I set this setting back to not configured and rebooted the EUD for good measure. After I logged on the shortcuts were showing!

I am not too sure why Microsoft does not mention this side effect, but hopefully, this will help someone else out.

[AdSense-A]