My PC was working all fine until I figured out that Group Policy gpedit.msc was not opening on my system. I wanted to open the Group Policy editor for some work and I was shocked to find that not only the gpedit.msc, even the other commands with msc extensions, were not working like services.msc, devmgmt.msc, compmgmt.msc etc.

Then I tried opening the editor by double clicking the gpedit.msc inside the system32 folder and I got the same error “Access is Denied”. What was strange was that I was accessing the editor from my Administrator account only.

I tried following things:

•    The first suspect is, of course, Virus, thus I scanned my whole system with the updated Anti Virus but it didn’t find any.

•    Then I scanned it with Windows Defender but it also didn’t find any malicious software.

•    I rebooted the system and entered in the Safe Mode but the commands were not working in that either.

Solution:

Then I finally decided to run System Restore and restored the system to some safe state I created when the PC was working all fine (good practice to create a checkpoint when the system is fine, isn’t it). I was relieved when this solved my problem.

Note: Try to Restore the system to a restore point created long ago.

UPDATE 1

since the problems vary for different users, installing Microsoft Management Console 3.0 for Windows XP again (as suggested by one of our viewers) may also work for you.

Download MMC

UPDATE 2 (Best Solution Working):

After all the efforts to find out the solution, we have been able to find the solution to this problem (Thanks to our alert reader Dickens). I am describing the solution given by him and is working all fine (i have tested myself on my PC)

  • Open Registry Editor (regedit.exe).
  • Now traverse to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.msc and delete the registry entry on the right side.
  • After deleting it when you again type gpedit.msc in Run box, it will open an “Open with” dialog.
  • Now select the second option and browse to get a new option; browse to C:\Windows\system32\mmc.exe
  • A new option “Microsoft Management Console” will appear in the window.
  • Select this option and remember to check the box below to always run the command without doing this again and again.
  • That’s it, all .msc extensions will now open.

Any feedback?