Question

Remotely change a user's wallpaper?

Asked by: FWeston

It's Friday and our IT staff is having some fun on the day before halloween.  I'm trying to figure out how I can remotely change the desktop wallpaper on my colleagues' computers.  Everything I've google'd will work but doesn't take effect immediately.  Any suggestions?  I've thought about using runas or psexec with a command line utility, but I don't know their passwords.  I am a domain admin, so I am an administrator on their PCs.

All PCs running XP SP3.

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Asked On
2009-10-30 at 09:03:40ID24858530
Topic

Windows XP Operating System

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
5

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    Answers

     

    by: greyknight17Posted on 2009-10-30 at 10:20:19ID: 25705054

    You probably tried the following already:

    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/556027
    http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/How-Force-Remote-Group-Policy-Processing.html

    It doesn't allow you to make the changes to their wallpaper by using the administrator password?

     

    by: FWestonPosted on 2009-10-30 at 11:16:36ID: 25705514

    No, I haven't tried propagating the setting via group policy as I didn't want to get that in depth and I don't think there's any way I can get that to take effect immediately anyway.  I can run gpupdate on the client computer, but unless I can figure out some way to run it as the logged on user instead of as me, I don't think it will update their user policies.

     

    by: xtreminatorPosted on 2009-10-31 at 01:23:50ID: 25708873

     

    by: greyknight17Posted on 2009-10-31 at 21:19:13ID: 25712594

    The second link I provided explains other methods to send the update remotely using scripts.

     

    by: FWestonPosted on 2009-11-02 at 06:10:07ID: 25719382

    greyknight17: sorry, I didn't think that using PsExec to run gpupdate would update the currently logged on user's group policy, since the gpupdate command would run using my credentials instead of theirs, but apparently it does.

    20120131-EE-VQP-002

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