If you are at your wit's end with the common-sense approach to troubleshooting Group Policy and are afraid something is actually going wrong under the hood, it's time to turn to the Windows Event Logs. If you suspect Group Policy is failing to process when the client reaches out and asks for applicable settings, the Windows System event log will generally have some information related to successes or failures in the Group Policy process. Open EVENTVWR.MSC on the client computer, and browse to Event Viewer | Windows Logs | System. This is the logging location for many aspects of the Windows operating system, so you may have to filter this log in order to view only events related to Group Policy. Right-clicking on System and selecting Filter Current Log... will give you some filtering options. Look inside the drop-down list for Event sources – there are numerous sources here related to Group Policy. Checking these boxes will filter the System event log down to display only Group-Policy-related events:

In the previous screenshot, you can see informational events that are indicating successful runs of Group Policy processing. You can also see some errors. This happened because I unplugged the NIC of my LAPTOP1 computer, and then I tried to do a gpupdate /force in order to refresh Group Policy settings. This obviously failed because I did not have any communication to a Domain Controller at the time, and that failure was reported inside the Windows System event logs.