Settings Page Visibility Group Policy causing settings app to crash in Windows 11

Question

Hi,

I am fairly new to Active Directory and Group Policy Management and am encountering an issue with applying a group policy.

I want to apply the Settings Page Visibility policy for an office environment that consists of mainly Windows 11 computers. To my knowledge, this policy allows administrators to hide/show only specific settings pages to users and I intend to show only the Display and Printers & Scanners menus. The option I set for the policy was: showonly:display;printers

However, after configuring the policy and applying it, the settings app on the Windows 11 computers kept crashing before it can open.

The initial process of configuring and applying the GPO are according to these instructions:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/client-management/client-tools/manage-settings-app-with-group-policy

The GPO containing the policy is linked to an OU that consists of both users and computers. The OU does not have any other linked or inherited GPOs. The AD/Domain Controller server is running on Windows Server 2022 Standard. Currently, I have the policy enabled under computer configuration but disabled under user configuration. (Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Control Panel > Settings Page Visibility). Local group policy on the devices are not configured.

I have done some testing on my own and here are the things I found out:

After every change I make to the GPO, I force a gpupdate on a user computer and check gpresult if the GPO is being applied and it is, its not being filtered out.

• I have tried to apply the policy exclusively on user configuration and computer configuration or applying on both computer and user configuration but it still crashed the settings app either way.
• The policy worked with both the hide and showonly options when it was applied to a Windows 10 computer.
• The policy worked when I used hide instead of showonly as the option, it successfully hid the menus I specified and did not crash the settings app.
• I tried accessing the settings app and its subsequent pages through Run and CMD but it still crashes.
• Logged on the same user on different computers, settings still crashed.
• Used SFC to scan for corrupt system files but there were none.

I checked Event Viewer and there were errors saying that the settings app is crashing due to an unknown reason. The policy seems to be applying and working, just not with the option of showonly. Does anyone know why this is the case? I'm starting to think this is some kind of bug. Help is appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

We've had a case open with Microsoft, appears it was a known bug in KB5031354. They have resolved in the November 2023 W11 Cumulative update KB5032190. I have tested today on a similarly affected test machine post KB5032190 install and it appears to be working normally once again.

Answer 2

Hello,

i have the same issue with regkey

reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer" /f /v "SettingsPageVisibility" /t REG_SZ /d "showonly:yourinfo;..."

The problem occurs since update KB5031354.

Answer 3

We have the same issue! any update from MS about a fix?!

Answer 4

Hi, We have the exact same issue.

Microsoft... please fix It...

It's a stopper for us to move out users from W10 to W11 in KIOSK mode.