I spend quite some time designing and building VMware View environments. If you’re like me you don’t want the users of your View desktops limited too much. After all, one of the great advantages of using VDI is that users are less limited than on a Citrix or RDS server. If the View desktop looks like the one at home users will like it more.
It’s still better however if regular users are prohibited from accessing certain settings. Just to make sure that they don’t break crucial things. This is best done with GPO’s (group policy objects in Active Directory). One of the things I don’t want users to see is the VMware Tools applet in the Control Panel. It’s this one:
It’s not too obvious how this should be hidden. Of course many Control Panel applets can be hidden using Active Directory GPO.
VMware actually has a KB article on this subject: KB Article: 1006354. What I don’t like about their solution is that it involves file security to block access to the applets. I prefer doing this kind of thing with GPO’s as it’s a better manageable solution. Also removing the registry key works fine but only until the tools are updated to a newer version. The registry key will than return and you’ll have to manually fix it again. So I tried to find a better way.
If you check your GPO (User \ Policies \ Administrative Templates \ Control Panel) you’ll find “Hide specified Control Panel items”. The “Help” here is actually quite helpful for a change. It mentions how you have to specify something like “Microsoft.Mouse” to remove the Mouse applet in Control Panel. It’s difficult to find the name for the VMware Tools applet though, at least I couldn’t find it. Maybe I checked the wrong places 
.
It is mentioned that for Vista and earlier you’re supposed to use the .CPL name, if a .CPL exists for the applet in question. The VMware Tools applet does have a .CPL file, it’s located in C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\VMControlPanel.cpl.
If this name is specified in the “Hide specified Control Panel items” it just doesn’t work. The VMware Tools applet remains in the Control Panel. So I played around with the first way of doing it described in “Help”, the Windows 7 method. It turns out that: “Vmware.VMControlpanel” works. So make a GPO setting like this:
The VMware Tools applet will now disappear from the Control Panel so it can’t be fiddled with.
Next to remove is the VMware tray utility. I’ll do that in another post.
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