Group policy is a powerful feature that allows you to secure your domain, control the desktop enviroment, deploy applications and more. There are times when a policy has been edited and needs to be forced.
With Windows XP came a new tool called GPUpdate. Using GPUpdate an administrator can enforce the update of group policies manually. Similar to the SecEdit command in Windows 2000, GPUpdate is a little easier to use as there are no switches required. GPUpdate does have a few available switches, but they are not required.
/target: computer | user - will specify if the computer or user portion of the policies should be applied. The deafult is for both to be updated.
/force - will reapply all the settings, as opposed to the default which only applies the settings that have changed.
/wait: [time in s] - will set the time to wait for processing of the policies to finish.
/logoff - will logoff the currently signed in user after processing has completed. This is used when updating users software installation, folder redirection settings and any other setting not applied in the normal background refresh cycle..
/boot - will reboot the computer after processing has completed. This is used when updating a computers software installation settings, or any other setting normally applied on startup. /sync - will cause the next foreground policy refresh to be performed synchronously, the default is asynchronous.
Now I just mentioned something called a refresh cycle. By default, some group policy settings are reapplied every 90 minutes. This can also be controlled via group policy. The settings are located under Computer Configuration|Administrative Templates|System|Group Policy.
Here we have a list of settings that can be used to customize the refresh cycle.
With the setting configured as shown, the settings in the GPO will apply on each refresh, even if there are no changes to the GPO. This ensures that the settings are always applied in a consistent manner.