Mapped network drives set by group policy are not applying to domain users who are members of the local administrators group (including members of the domain admins group) on both Windows 8 Pro and Windows 8 Enterprise machines. The only way I found to get the mapped drives policy to apply for these users is to remove the domain account from the local machines administrators group and/or the domain admins group.
The GPO is linked to the right domain and the security filtering is set for “Authenticated Uses”. I have the mapped drives set to “Replace” and “Reconnect”. Also checked is “Run in logged-on user’s security context (user policy option)” and “Remove this item when it’s no longer applied”. The GPO status for computer configuration is set to “Disabled” and user configuration is set to “Enabled”.
I’ve tried the following, but none of the solutions work for my situation:
1) I tested with every level of user account control: from never prompt, to always prompt, but after restarting the system each time, the mapped drives still fail to apply.
2) I added the “EnableLinkedConnections” (value set to 1) 32-bit DWORD value to the registry at:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
I tried this setting with UAC enabled and disabled, but after rebooting each time, the mapped drives still fail to apply.
3) Enforcing the GPO makes no difference.
I don’t have any issues with the mapped drives GPO applying to local admins on Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise machines, just with workstations running Windows 8. The active directory-group policy server is running Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, and all the Windows 8 machines are properly joined to the domain and are able to communicate with the DC. All other GPO's apply properly with the exception of scripts that rely on the mapped drives.
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