(AD)Remove the shutdown button, without disabling the shutdown command.

In Windows 2000 it somethimes happend that a production server was brought down by mistake, while the administrator wanted to log off, he pressed the shutdown button instead. This great moment of inberrisment, was solved when Microsoft presented Windows Server 2003. But there are still a lot of companies who run a mixture of server OS'ses. One of these companies asked me, how they could prevent an administrator from shutting down the system by mistake. They tried the default policies, that you find in Group Policy Editor. But when you when you enable this policy, you are also prevented from running the shutdown command localy. This company wanted to keep the option of shutting down the system localy, yet hidding the shutdown options.



Well this can be done by editing the registry.

HCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

New Dword= NoClose

Value= 1



I've created and an ADM template, so you can import in a GPO.
You can get it here

Note: When you enable this policy, you will see that the policy "remove access to the shutdown command" will become enabled. Nevertheless you will have access to the she shutdown command on computer objects affected by this policy.