Finding “Prevent Performance of First Run Wizard” in Windows 8.1 Group Policy

I’ve seen a number of people struggle to find the group policy to disable Internet Explorer’s first run Wizard in Windows 8.1. Many people across the internets have suggested to set the policy registry key via Group Policy preferences.

With a policy key in existence though we should be able to find the Group Policy setting. I like to use a fast & free search utility from NirSoft called SearchMyFiles http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/search_my_files.html (Note: This site might be blocked on some corporate networks due to the “hacking” tools available from this site)

I search C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions folder for contents that includes part of the registry key I’m looking for. In this case I searched for DisableFirstRun which we can see is found in inetres.admx

  

We then search the relevant ADMX for the registry value name we are looking for. We will use the displayName NoFirstRunCustomise to search the relevant .adml file.

 

Next we must open the relevant language file – this will be in a sub folder based on the language you are using. In this case we are using US English so we open \en-US\inetres.adml

So we find the display name…and yes it has been changed to Prevent Running First Run wizard. Which makes a whole lot more sense “Prevent Performance of…” but also breaks all existing documentation on the internets regarding this policy…

And sure enough it is there…