How to Block your Corporate Wallpaper in Windows

If you have a corporate wallpaper pushed to your desktop / laptop, chances are it’s being done with Windows Group Policy. It’s likely this is a PR rather than IT initiative, IT being there to service rather than brand the customer.

You can override this wallpaper with some local settings, although this *may* have impacts down the track where other settings are also blocked. This may or may not be a bad thing, depending on your perspective. It will definitely mean that IT won’t be happy as your PC is no longer standard and may not behave as they expect. This isn’t really a big stress, as with the advent of the Internet and web applications, no machine is the same as another anymore, despite opinions to the contrary. Your mileage may vary.

You need to have local administrative rights to make these changes. You may be this already, many laptop users are due to deficiencies in XP. Vista users are less likely to be local admin, as the newer design doesn’t require admin rights as frequently. To test if you are a local admin, try the below steps, if it denies you access, you need to escalate your privileges. Your friendly IT staff member may do this by adding your user account the the local pc administrators group, or alternately you can look at escalation of privilege attacks on the system. It is preferable not to be an administrator all the time, as the computer is MUCH more vulnerable to being attacked if you log on with Administrative access.

There is another way to gain administrative access. Every computer has a default Administrator account. Normally it’s named “Administrator”, but many companies to rename it. If you can get he password for this account, you can logon with it, and do what you want.
If you can’t get the password a nice utility from Peter Nordahl called NT Password Reset Disk will reset the password for the Administrator account, renamed or not. There is some risk with using this tool, but it still worked on NT/2K/XP/Vista including SP1 when I use it. You break your PC, you get to explain to IT  what happened.

Once you have admin access you need to open a Registry Editor

Check the account you are logged on with is a member of the group “Administrators”This is found under My Computer (Right Click) ManageAlso check if the account “Administrator” has been renamed.
Start | Run | Regedt32
Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software \Microsoft\Windows \CurrentVersion\Policies\System
Right click “system” in the LHS pane and select “Permissions”
Click the “Advanced” Button
Untick “Include Inheritable Permissions from the Objects Parent”And select “Copy” existing permissions when prompted
Add “Full Control” to your user accountRemove “Full Control” from “System” and “Administrators” – leave “Read”.
You can now set the wallpaper path in the registry to whatever wallpaper you prefer. The key “Wallpaper” contains the path. If you delete the 2 “wallpaper” keys, then you will have access to set your wallpaper in windows as normal.
WallpaperStyle settings are as follows	0 Centered 1 Tiled 2 Stretchedas per MS

Presto – you now own your wallpaper again. You still can’t set it from the usual “Right Click” – select, but changing the path above isn’t too difficult.

The other options you have as workarounds against wallpaper policies depend on where the wallpaper file comes from.

If the file is stored locally on your PC, you can simply replace the file with something else with the same name, and change the permissions to stop it being over-written.

If it’s on the network, if you boot up disconnected, you won’t get the wallpaper.

Happy playing.
And remember, don’t trust anything you read on the Internet, we are all evil hackers out to get you. Now can I have your c/c details please?