When introducing the Group Policy Preferences in your organization, you need to make sure all your systems have the Client Side Extensions software installed. This CSE package can be distributed by WSUS but can also be deployed separately. But for GPP to work you must also have XMLLite installed if your IE version is below 7.

Jacob Heidelberg created a script that checks your Windows version and based on that installs the patches required automatically. However that script does not check for IE7 and if you have IE7 installed, it will still try to install the XML Lite patch. I have edited the script a bit so that when IE7 or higher is found, the XML Lite patch will be skipped.

I also added the possibility to have computers that do not match the requirements for GPP write their computer name in a file. So you can investigate prior to distribution. If you would like to investigate but not roll-out the patches, change the following part:

Function ExecuteThis(FULLSTRING)

  Dim objShell : Set objShell = CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
  'ExecuteThis = objShell.Run(FULLSTRING,,1)
  Set objShell = Nothing
End Function

Note the ‘ before the ExecuteThis line.

The location of your patches is also the location for the GppReady.txt file (create prior for distribution of the script) where the clients will record their name (and date/time) if not GPP ready.

Download the gppready file and rename to GppReady.vbs. Then you can create a GPO (Group Policy Object) and set this script as the loginscript for the computer. Link the GPO to the OU where your computers are in, and voila!

Sometimes the link does not work.. use this one instead

Update: also remove all lines that start with wscript.echo if you decide to run the script fully automated on computer startup..