Mitch Tulloch's Blog

Windows tip: How to troubleshoot Group Policy issues

Taking a systematic approach when troubleshooting problems is usually better than rolling dice or shooting in the dark. When something goes wrong with Group Policy processing and a client running Windows Vista or later doesn't receive the policy settings you expected it to receive, you can troubleshoot the issue by following these steps:

First, open Event Viewer using administrator credentials on your computer and expand the console tree to select Administrative Events, which is found under Custom Views. Look here for any policy processing failures that may have happened, and if you find such an event, select the General tab for the event and click the Event Log Online Help link and see what additional information doing this brings up. If this isn't sufficient to resolve your problem, proceed with the next step below.

Second, still in Event Viewer, select the Operational log found under Applications And Services Logs \ Microsoft \ Windows \ Group Policy. Locate a failure (error or warning) event and select it, switch to the Details tab for the event, select the XML View option, and locate the correlation ID for the event (see attached figure). This ID identifies the particular series of Group Policy processing events to which the selected event belongs.

Third, install GPLogView.exe (you can download this tool from here). Then open an admin-level command prompt, change the current directory to C:\Program Files\GroupPolicy Logview, and run the following command:

gplogview –a <activity ID>

This will filter the Group Policy Operational log for all events having the specified activity ID and display these events in order. Here's some sample output from running this command:

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