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In Windows 2000, Group Policy updates are dynamic and occur at specific intervals. If there have been no changes to Group Policy, the client computer still refreshes the security policy settings at regular intervals for the Group Policy object (GPO).
If no changes are discovered, GPOs are not processed, but security policies are. For security policies, there is a value that sets a maximum limit of how long a client can function without reapplying non-changed GPOs. By default, this setting is every 16 hours plus the randomized offset of up to 30 minutes. Even when GPOs that contain security policy settings do not change, the policy is reapplied every 16 hours and the following event is logged in the Application event log:
Event Type: Information
Event Source: SceCli
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1704
Date: date
Time: time
User: N/A
Computer: computer name
Description: Security policy in the Group policy objects are applied successfully.
To delay the security policy from being applied when no changes have been made in the GPO, you can configure the
MaxNoGPOListChangesInterval registry value. This value specifies the maximum number of minutes the extension is to be skipped because the policy has not changed. This value is found in the follow registry setting:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\GPExtensions\{827D319E-6EAC-11D2-A4EA-00C04F79F83A}
Value: MaxNoGPOListChangesInterval
Data: Minutes of delay, entered in hexadecimal
By default, this value is set to 0x3c0, (960 minutes or 16 hours). When you set this value to 0x2760, the client waits 7 days to refresh the policy when there have been no changes to the GPO.
Note If a client computer is switched off for longer than the described interval, the security GPO is applied the next time that the computer is restarted. Depending on the GPO processing, as shown in the ACL settings on Files and Registry, the user may experience an unexpected delay during logon.
For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
203607
How to modify the default group policy refresh interval
227302 Using SECEDIT to force a group policy refresh immediately