Local Group Policy Editor is a powerful tool which provides you with a user interface to manage all the settings of Local Group Policy objects. There are variety of advanced settings available, specially for Network Administrators to fine-tune the settings on a single computer.
Now you might face certain issues while using such a nifty tool. Recently, we had discovered that some users are being greeted with a message whenever they open Local Group Policy Editor on their PC with Windows 10 Version 1511. Here’s what the message reads:
As it seems, this issue crops up due to the Microsoft-Windows-Geolocation-WLPAdm.admx file. When you upgrade to Windows 10 November Release (Version 1511), a new file named LocationProviderAdm.admx is created under path C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions\ while the old Microsoft-Windows-Geolocation-WLPAdm.admx file is kept intact. This causes a conflict as there are two ADMX files to address the same policy namespace.
When you open these files in Notepad++, you’ll notice that both the files are configured with same target Policy Namespace which causes them to be at odds.
Microsoft-Windows-Geolocation-WLPAdm.admx
LocationProviderAdm.admx
How To Resolve The Conflict
You won’t have to do much to get rid of this pesky message. If you’re a person with love for sublimity, you can do the following to root out this error message once and for all.
You’ll need to delete or rename the ADML and ADMX files from any one of LocationProviderADM or Microsoft-Windows-Geolocation-WLPAdm. For instance, we’ll take into consideration Microsoft-Windows-Geolocation-WLPAdm files.
2. Navigate to the following paths in File Explorer and locate the files Microsoft-Windows-Geolocation-WLPAdm.admx and Microsoft-Windows-Geolocation-WLPAdm.adml. Right-Click and delete these files from here.
C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions\Microsoft-Windows-Geolocation-WLPAdm.admx
C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions\en-US\Microsoft-Windows-Geolocation-WLPAdm.adml
3. If you getting File Access Denied error as below while trying to delete, this simply means that you need to add NTFS permissions to these files as these are system-protected and one can’t simply go and remove them.
To take permissions, follow the below steps:
Grant Full Control To Administrators Group
A. Open an elevated Command Prompt window by right-clicking Start button and choosing Command Prompt (Admin). Enter the below commands in the prompt window:
takeown /F ” C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions\Microsoft-Windows-Geolocation-WLPAdm.admx” /A
takeown /F ” C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions\en-US\Microsoft-Windows-Geolocation-WLPAdm.adml” /A
B. This will change the file ownership to Administrators group. But you still don’t have permissions to delete the file. You would need to grant full control to Administrator group to be able to delete the file.
C. Right-Click on any one of ADML and ADMX file and select Properties. Under Security tab, click on Advanced button in bottom right corner.
D. Now, In Advanced Security Settings window, select Administrators in Permission entries box and click on Change permissions button.
This will open up Permission Entry window for selected file. Click on Add button in this window to add permissions to the current entry.
E. In new window that pops up, Click on Select a principal to add a user or group to the Principal field.
F. Enter Administrators in the box under Enter the object name to select and click on Check Names button. This will auto-populate the valid Administrators group in the box. Click on OK to save it.
G. Now, in the Permission Entry window that comes on top again, check all the boxes under Basic permissions section. Click on OK to save the settings.
H. Again, in Advanced Security Settings window, click on Apply and then OK. Similarly, click on OK in Properties window to save the settings for that particular file.
I. Try to delete the file now. It should get deleted without any permission issues. Repeat the same process for changing the permissions for the other file (ADML or ADMX) as well.
That is it, folks! You won’t be bothered with this error message anymore whenever you launch Local Group Policy Editor.
