Unable to delete comments in Administrative Settings of Group Policy Editor in Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7

You are managing Group Policy in an Active Directory domain using the Administration tools that come with Windows Server 2008 R2 or the Windows 7 RSAT package. When you edit Administrative Settings, you also enter comments to describe the on-going work. Sometimes you want to remove a comment.

Although this seems to work initially, if you open the policy setting in a new instance of Group Policy Editor, the last version of the comment is shown. Also when you run a report of the policy, you will see that the comment is still shown there.

When removing a comment, the check to write the change to a file is done incorrectly and the deletion of the comment is not written to the file holding the comment.

To work around the problem, include any non-empty string in the comment. For example, adding a single space to the comment is enough to avoid the problem.

The policy report will still show the comment, even though no setting is made in the policy. In this case, the only way to get rid of the comment is to remove COMMENT.CMTX in the policy folder, user or computer part. Note that this will remove all comments for the user or computer part in this policy.

If you want to find the comment and selectively remove it from the file, you have to understand the XML syntax that is stored here. You may require the assistance of Microsoft Support to accomplish this.

The Group Policy Editor in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 are not affected by this issue.

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