Locality Switch

AVG Network Edition works great at my local community radio station. It comes with a central management console, isn’t very obtrusive, consumes little system resources, and comes for a great price. There’s only one thing I hate about it: the AVG Security Toolbar.

I fail to see how a toolbar with a Yahoo search bar can enhance your security. Seriously, it’s just annoying. And I want to disable it. Don’t you want to do the same?

There wasn’t an option within the network management console to disable such a feature site wide, and the AVG Knowledge Base didn’t provide any help. In fact, the best advice I got was to reinstall the software and choose not to install it. However, the Network Edition remote installation tool didn’t support this, and doing it manually on every PC wasn’t an option for me.

Thankfully, Group Policy came to the rescue! It all revolves around the CLSID, which, in short, is a unique identifier given to each Internet Explorer Addon.

The CLSID for the AVG Network Edition is:

{CCC7A320-B3CA-4199-B1A6-9F516DD69829}

What if you want to find a CLSID for a different add on which you want to kill? It’s simple! Kinda. Within Internet Explorer, navigate to Tools > Manage Addons. The CLSID is shown if you right click on the column headings on that popup window and tick the CLSID option. Make note of it.

Within the Group Policy Management Console, navigate to User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Internet Explorer > Security Features > Add-on Management. You want to open up the Add On List. Here’s what Microsoft instructs in regards to this window:

You specify individual add-ons by using the CLSID in the Add-on List policy setting. The Value Name part of the policy setting must be the CLSID of the add-on, and the CLSID must include the braces that enclose the rest of the CLSID. The Value part of the policy setting must contain one of three possible values:

• 0 – The add-on is disabled, and users cannot manage the add-on from the user interface.
• 1 – The add-on is enabled, and users cannot manage the add-on from the user interface.
• 2 – The add-on is enabled, and users can manage the add-on from the user interface.

So, to disable the AVG Security Toolbar, you would set the Value Name as {CCC7A320-B3CA-4199-B1A6-9F516DD69829} (including the curly braces) and the Value as 0. Save all of that, and then wait for the changes to be applied to your machines (or force it with gpupdate).

What a relief this is. Now my users aren’t bothered with annoying toolbars or invaded search results, and we still have AVG running unaffected! Group Policy saved the day, once again.