Group Policy is a great tool to be able to enforce rules and business requirements on all of the machines in an organization.

Unfortunately, some AD group policy (GPO) settings are not preferable. As a local administrator on a machine, there is a way to prevent Group Policy from affecting your computer.

You must be a local administrator on your machine to affect these changes.

Caution: changing registry settings may be detrimental to the health of your computer. We do not warrant that these changes will work on your machine; in fact, it is more likely they will break your machine. Please proceed with caution.

1. Click Start, Run, type in 'regedit' and click OK.

2. Navigate to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies

3. Remove any policies you do not want on your computer.

4. Right-click on the Policies key and choose Permissions.

5. Change all of the users or groups listed to Read only (uncheck Full Control).

6. Click OK. Close Regedit.

7. Reboot, the policies should not reapply.

You can always set the key back to Full Control is required at a later date if you are an Administrator on the machine - you still can keep "ownership" in a security sense.