While most of the red and green marks inside the Group Policy editor are underlining text, you will occasionally find red and green circles hovering around particular settings. Their purpose is exactly the same as the underlines. Sometimes, underlining text doesn't show up well or it is difficult to determine what setting you are manipulating, and so Microsoft switches to circling the settings.

A green circle means that particular setting will process on a machine when the GPO applies, and a red circle means that setting will be ignored. You can see in the following screenshot that these circles show up inside Internet Explorer preferences:

As an exercise to ensure this is all making sense, let's walk through some of the settings shown in the preceding screenshot:

• Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering is a green circle, and as such this setting is going to be processed when the GPO applies to the machine. The setting is also checked, meaning that our GP Preference is going to turn this setting On inside Internet Explorer.
• Always expand ALT text for images is a green circle, so it is also going to be processed. Since the box is unchecked, it means that this setting will be actively turned Off when the GPO hits the computer.
• Enable Caret Browsing for new windows and tabs is red, so this setting will not be processed by the GPO. It doesn't matter whether the checkbox is marked, because it is going to totally ignore this setting.
• Play system sounds is red, also meaning that it will be ignored. I wanted to point this one out because you can see that I have checked the box next to the setting, which makes you think at first that it is going to be applied, but remember that because it is currently circled in red, this means that even though I checked the box, nothing is going to happen with this setting because it will be ignored when Group Policy does its magic.

F5, F6, F7, and F8 work with the circles in the same way they work to change the underline colors.

Remember, the red circle or red underline does not mean that the setting is going to be disabled! That would mean that the setting was actually doing something, performing some action. Whenever you see a red underline or a red circle, remember that this means the setting will be ignored completely. If you go ahead and input a value into a red-underlined or red-circled setting, that value has no meaning whatsoever because that particular setting will be completely passed over and ignored.