Failed to refresh user policy. Error - Access is denied.

[TomK]

I get the subject message when I do a gpupdate /force.

We've been scratching our heads for a couple days on this. We're not even
sure if access is denied to something local or some policy.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Tom

[James Yeomans BSc, MCSE]

Hi, what happens if you type gpresult from the command line it should give
you output to tell you what policies are being applied and filtered out.
--
James Yeomans, BSc, MCSE

[TomK]

Well, this one is a hard one for me to grasp. I tried running gpresult and
got another access denied message even though I'm logged on with local admin
creds. So I started looking more closely at everything. Turns out the cmd
prompt I was using was set for "Run As" as the default action (typically I'm
logged on as a user and occasionally need an elevated prompt). When I told
it to use the "current user" instead of supplying an ID and password I was
expecting that it would grab my elevated logon creds and go. Seems like it
didn't and was running without any user credentials associated with it.
When I just did Start -> Run -> CMD both gpresult and gpudate worked as
intended.

I've never seen that before, but I'll think to look for it next time. From
now on I'll just right-click the command prompt icon and do my Run As there.

Thanks for the response. Even though it didn't directly fix my issue it led
me to the answer.

Tom

[Aneesh Aravind]

Tom,

Did you ever figure this out? I am facing the same issue. I am connected to
the DC and I launch cmd.exe under a different user's credentials. Then I type:

gpupdate /Target:user /Force

I would expect the user whose credentials I have launched the cmd prompt
gets his gp updated. Instead what I get is:

Failed to refresh User Policy. Error - Access is denied. Exiting...

The computer policy does get updated properly. I am logged in as a local
administrator and the user whose credentials I am using has a locally cached
profile on the machine.

TIA,
Aneesh Aravind.