Preventing Users From Changing The My Documents Path

Preventing Users From Changing The “My Documents” Path

Someone in your household or office changing the path for the “My Documents” folder? Are your network users changing the locations of My Documents on their local machines?

As you know, if users right-click the My Documents icon on their desktops and click Properties, the Target tab will allow them change the path of this folder.

If you want to remove the ability to change this in the future, it can be done either of two ways:

1. If you are on a network or use Group Policies, you can use the Prohibit user from changing My Documents path group policy: User Configuration\AdministrativeTemplates\Desktop.
2. If you are not on a network or have not deployed Group Policies, you can use Regedit (Windows 9x) or Regedt32 (NT and 2000) to navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer On the Edit menu, select Add Value name: (DWORD – REG-DWORD) Name it: DisablePersonalDirChange

   Set the data value to 1 disability the ability to change the path and 0 to enable the ability.