Well, you surely can not disable the Group Policy on any of the XP machine. The policy also encloses almost all the settings for the machine to operate. It is actually a large set of system settings and they are required for operation. Policy is not truly something that can be "disabled" but fairly the total of all the machine's settings, from how it corresponds to how the desktop appears.

In a domain, there may be a domain admin that controls the person policies on the member machines. But with no superior administrator, the admin on a local machine has that control.

The message which you are receiving has less to do with the policy than it has to do with the fact that your system is been contaminated. When Malware molest, it tries to disable the system that may be using it to eliminate it.

Well, is there any kind of way for setting the group policies back to the defaults or the ones which were in effect when the operating system was first loaded?

You ought to distress yourself with getting rid of the contamination before it does any more injury. The following tools can permit you to alter some system settings to get the functionality back, but they are also likely to only be temporary:

XP Security Console, Infiltration Recovery Tool and Remove Restrictions Tool.

Well, at least I believe that I have located some part of the issue. I have two computers close to each other, one which lets me make alter to security settings and one that does not. So, I quickly ran qpedit.msc on both the machines and it just started down list trying to find differences between them.

It seems that on one machine I have the Internet Explorer improved Security Configuration installed as well as on the other I do not. It seems to be at the MS web site, this is a download that is intended for MS Server 2003.

Any ideas on how to uninstall this thing? Or is it a part of the MS SQL Server installation?

If it was installed, it must be in Add/Remove. But--> Disabling Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration.

Well, I also entered the download button for IEES to save the file and also to see what it was all about. No executables there, just documents. Also appears that this is just a part of server 2003. The documentation explains several registry settings that might be examined to see if IEES is running on my machine. No such registry settings exist on my machine, expected for the reason that it is a WIN XP Pro box.

I'm also starting to think that my only option at this point is to reload my XP operating system and then start it from the scratch. I also could not figure out why my machine thinks it has IEES installed.

I have determined to try and uninstall IE7 to see what that would do. Well, turn out you cannot uninstall IE7 if you have already installed SP3. There is no remove button in add/remove programs after you have installed SP3 in the computer. Anyhow, on to uninstall SP3, which worked, but after SP3 is take away, I still get the message about the sysadmin controlling some of the settings in control panel > internet options. Okay, on to uninstall IE7. This, handily, re-installs IE6. Well, achievement!! I now have entire control of my machine back again. Control panel > internet options now permit me to make amending to any of the setting. But, just to keep me estimating. My other box is having SP3 installed and IE7 and I have entire rights to the machine from the beginning. What is the difference? I just don't appreciate it. Next step is to reinstall SP3 and then put IE7 on after SP3 is installed and see if that reasons for any change in performance. Well, that is if I choose to use IE7 any longer at all. I just have to download Google Chrome and am making use of it to write this message.

The distinction is most likely that only one machine is been infected.