Disabling Restore button in Previous Versions tab

[skwiggley]

Back in the day (2005) I added a home-made Group Policy setting to
disable the Restore button on the Previous Versions tab in Windows XP
SP2. The logic to this is that I want users to be able to copy an old
version of a file back into their folder without the risk of them
accidentally restoring an entire department's directory to an older
state.

This worked well. In a shared folder, when a user right-clicked and
chose Properties, the Previous Versions tab showed but the Restore
button was ghosted (View and Copy were enabled).

At some point (I'm not really sure when?), this stopped working. I have
tried playing around with the registry on my local machine but I just
don't seem to be able to disable that button any more. Has
anyone else seen this? It's reeeeally annoying.

The registry key I have been changing is:
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

I added a DWORD called NoPreviousVersionsRestore and set the value to
one.

Since it stopped working, I tried adding that DWORD to the following
location:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer

Still nothing. So, I tried adding the DWORD NoPreviousVersionsPage to
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer. Still nothing.

This is important to me because we push the self-help concept as much
as possible, and everyone has access to the Restore button. That scares
me.

Anyone..?

Reference material:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=888603
http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/gp/admtgp.mspx%23ESNAC

Simon

[skwiggley]

I installed an updated version of twext.dll from
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/903234 and now the registry tweaks all
work. So... I must have previously had a different version of twext.dll
when I had it working earlier.

I will push out the hotfix listed at
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/903234 which seems to add the ability
to disable the restore button, or the whole tab, on clients.

Simon

[Jerold Schulman]

Make sure your versions of the libraries mentioned in tip 9088 » Update to disable Volume Shadow Copy Service restore options on Terminal Server client computers that are running Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP.
in the 'Tips & Tricks' at http://www.jsifaq.com are equal or newer.

Jerold Schulman
Windows Server MVP
JSI, Inc.
http://www.jsiinc.com
http://www.jsifaq.com