This would be a good place to mention a uniqueness that exists when manipulating Internet Explorer settings with Group Policy. Really, this special consideration exists for any preference packages within which there are multiple tabs of settings, but off the top of my head, the Internet Explorer settings are the only ones that I can think of, so we will focus on these.

When you create a new Preference package of settings that pertain to Internet Explorer, Group Policy Management Editor displays those settings in a neat way; they look and feel the same way they do if you were manipulating the Internet Options on a client computer. Need to enable a proxy server? Visit the Connections tab and input one. Want to change the default behavior of JavaScript on web pages? Head on over to the Advanced tab and make your adjustments. You configure the settings you want to push to your client computers in the same way you would as if you were doing it within the actual Internet Explorer menus. While this is really handy, it also means that as you click through all of those tabs to find the setting that you want to manipulate, you will be seeing a whole lot of green underlines and green circles. You already know why this happens—Group Policy tends to default everything to green. As you also already know, green means take action. Those green-laced settings will be pushed onto the client computers by the GPO.

Any time that you click on a tab inside Internet Explorer settings, whether or not you configure anything within that tab, it enables all of the settings shown within that tab. If you were to create a new preferences package for IE settings and click on the Security, Privacy, and Advanced tabs – even if you did not change a single thing inside any of the tabs – when you click the OK button to close that window, all of those settings marked with green are now stored inside your GPO. This is very important to remember as you build IE Preferences!

When dealing with Internet Explorer settings (or any other settings that have tabs), it is smart to head straight to the setting that you want to configure. If you need to poke around a little to find it, go ahead and do that, but then make sure to Cancel out of the screen, and then recreate the preference package. On the second go-around, you can then navigate to the exact setting you are looking for, change it, and you won't have touched any other tabs. Any tabs that you don't touch don't pertain to the package and will not be processed. But as soon as you click on a tab, All of the settings inside that tab get pumped into the GPO and are relevant to your package.

Is this a major nuisance? Yeah, it sure can be. But as long as you know about the behavior here, it's easy enough to work with. Keep your fingers close to that F8 button to set all of the settings on each tab to be red!