“The given Key was not present in the dictionary” error when running Group Policy Modeling

I ran into a rather strange error today when trying to run Group Policy Modeling on a user. Instead of showing me Summary and Settings I received an error stating that The given Key was not present in the dictionary.

At first I thought that maybe we had used some Norwegian characters somewhere in a policy, but after some googling it turns out that this is caused by ticking the parent registry container when using the Registry Wizard to create a gpo registry preference.

Microsoft has published a kb article about it here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2692409

However the resolution they are presenting is useless for most organizations I think. Recreating all registry collections is not an option, at least it wasn’t for us.

So here’s how to do it in a less time consuming manor (but it may still take some time):

Edit any gpo you have used to set registry settings, navigate to the registry settings and look for entries looking like this:

The setting you need to delete here is TimeZoneInformation, you can spot them by the icon (the regedit icon) and by the fact that they have a blank Type.

After deleting all of this type of entries you can rerun your query and it will work as it should

Category(s): Active Directory, Microsoft
Tags: , , , ,

5 Responses to “The given Key was not present in the dictionary” error when running Group Policy Modeling

  1. Brilliant, helped me find the problem setting

    Mark Dowling says:

    Thanks for this – saved me a lot of time and heartache!

  2. Thankyou very much for posting this, saved me a huge amount of time finding the problematic GPO setting. Solution still valid in 2019!

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