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Creating shortcuts with Group Policy Preferences doesn’t work

Apr 29

G JohanssonADMX, Windows 7 GPMC, GPO, Group Policy Preferences, Preference, Script 3 Comments

This is a quite common question about Group Policy Preferences so I’ll post it here and maybe someone will benefit from the information.

Scenario:
Trying to create a shortcut to a fixed drive letter using Group Policy Preference that points to a location on the network. After login there is no shortcut created and if you look in eventlog you see an error “0×80070002 The system cannot find the file specified”. If you run GPupdate /Force the shortcut is created.

This is an issue where it’s trying to create the shortcut before the drive’s are connected and Windows can’t create new shortcuts to locations not connected.

Workarounds:

1. Create the shortcut using UNC-path
2. Create the drives and shortcuts using logonscript
3. Create a scheduled task (using GPP) to run GPupdate after user logon or use logonscript to run GPupdate

Hope someone benefits from this information.