Let's pretend for a minute that you are working on an issue where some GPO settings are not applying to the workstation next to you. You have tried to figure this out, including working your way through all of the troubleshooting steps we have discussed so far. In fact, you can successfully verify via Inheritance and from GPResult itself that the GPO is successfully applying to your machine, and yet the settings do not exist!

One other variable that is often overlooked is that certain settings inside Group Policy are only applicable to particular versions of the Windows Operating System. If new security settings introduced in Windows 10 are pushed down to a Windows 7 client, they will likely be ignored. If those settings are for a technology that did not exist in Win7, the settings will definitely be ignored, even though the GPO finishes processing successfully on that Win7 machine.

While this issue is admittedly difficult to track down, you can make sure you never get into this situation by fully understanding the settings that you plug in to your GPOs in the first place, and by making good notes and comments inside your policies. If a setting only pertains to Windows 10 Enterprise systems, make a comment about that inside the GPO. This will at least shorten the amount of time it takes Joe Admin to diagnose this disturbing behavior.

When adding any setting to any GPO, read over the notes and comments provided by Microsoft inside the setting. The GPO settings screen has a section entitled Supported on. If the setting you are viewing is limited to working only with certain versions of Windows, you should see it defined here: