Remove Power Shell and Server Manager Pinned Icons from Start Menu Server 2012

In Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 by default all users have a Power Shell icon and a Server Manager icon pinned to their start menu.  When setting up a Remote Desktop Session Host with Windows Server 2012 Remote Desktop Services you may not want users to have the Server Manager icon or Power Shell icon especially when desktop access is enabled.

 

In previous versions of Windows Server there was a Group Policy setting called "Remove pinned programs list from the Start Menu" which administrators could use to remove these pinned applications from the start menu from Remote Desktop Session Hosts.

 

 

This policy no longer works on Windows Server 2012 and there is no well documented method available for doing this on the Internet.

 

In Windows Server 2012, the three default pinned applications on the start menu are located under the following location:

 

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar

 

 

The User Pinned\Taskbar  folder in the Quick Launch directory does not exist in the Default profile in Windows Server 2012 as shown below.

So how do these icons get created in the users profile and where do they come from?

This process appears to be hardcoded into Windows Server 2012 and executed upon creating a new user profile.  The user profile creation process creates Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar folder as part of the login then copies a bunch of "lnk" shortcut files from the "All Users Profile".

Server Manager Pinned Icon

The "Server Manager.lnk" file gets copied by the user profile creation From:

"C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Administrative Tools\Server Manager.lnk"

To:

"C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar\Server Manager.lnk"

Windows PowerShell Pinned Icon

The "Windows PowerShell.lnk" file gets copied by the user profile creation From:

"C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\System Tools\Windows PowerShell.lnk"

To:

"C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar\Windows PowerShell.lnk"

How to Prevent the icons from getting Populated to User Profiles

To stop the "Windows PowerShell.lnk" and "Server Manager.lnk" shortcuts from getting pinned to the start menu on all users, simply delete these icons from the All Users profile under "C:\ProgramData" from the following locations:

"C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Administrative Tools\Server Manager.lnk"

and

"C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\System Tools\Windows PowerShell.lnk"

 

Now when new users login for the first time, the User Profile creation process is unable to copy the "Server Manager.lnk" and "Windows PowerShell.lnk" shortcuts as they no longer exist as shown in the following screenshot.

 

 

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