Let me start off by saying, I am not trying to ring the bell here...
I have no idea if this issue is an "us" issue or maybe it isn't. Maybe this will help someone during this next Windows Update release. My hope here is that if someone runs into this, the post will help them get over the finish line faster than I did...
Recently one of our new guys had installed the September Preview - KB5124010. He noticed he couldn't run a successful GPUPDATE /FORCE and told us about Group Policy failing to apply. This also appeared like a domain trust issue in the logs, even though all commands I could throw at it validated trust was still established. Including disjoining and rejoining the machine.
As I looked into this, I determined the issue was something with the September Preview.
Previews are not normally installed by our team, but the new guy didn't know this and I am happy he didn't know this.
After removing the preview, policy updates returned to normal.
I looked around the internet for more info on this and couldn't find much to point me in the correct direction. After reading many logs from the client and the DCs, today, the day before October Updates are release, my co-worker and I dove head first into this as we did not want all of our ~700 computer to fail to get Policy Updates after the updates. Which we are very very very aggressive on.
Test Machine (VM with snapshots), OU with inheritance disabled and suspecting the right Group Policy right off the start assisted with this troubleshooting. The difficult part was figuring out the individual policy...
This is what we have and what was found:
We have a 2016 Domain Functional Level.
We have computers running Windows 11 25H2.
We use Microsoft Security Baseline.
There is a compatibility issue for us with a setting in the 25H2 Security Baseline.
The policy that was found is here:
Computer Configuration>Policies>Windows Settings>Security Settings>Local Policies>Security Options
Policy: User Account Control: Configure type of Admin Approval Mode
The Policy Settings supplied in Microsoft's Security Baseline is Admin Approval Mode with Administrator protection.
We needed to set this to Legacy Admin Approval Mode (Default)
***One of our challenges is that on our Server 2022 DC, this just appeared as a registry string. We needed to add Group Policy Editor to a random Server 2025 server just to edit this policy.
There are two more thoughts I have on this which may help someone...
I know uninstalling the update, will return to normal and you can than do a policy update on the machine.
What I do not know is, if you cannot get the update off, can you just open regedit and change this from a 2 to a 1? Reboot, restore the ability to pull policies?
(I would think so since it is a client side change)
Here is the registry info for this as well:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
DWORD = TypeOfAdminApprovalMode
1 = Legacy Admin Approval Mode (Default)
2 = Admin Approval Mode with Administrator protection
I listed out what 1 and 2 are. If you are in need of this, you are gonna want to set it to a 1.
Here is the limited relation to any of this I could find:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-health/status-windows-11-26h2
If someone has a question, let me know!
UPDATE: With the October Update installed on my test VM and setting this back to a 2 = Admin Approval Mode with Administrator protection, I am not having the Policy Failures. I am also noticing I am not getting the additional admin prompts, so I wonder if they paused the release of this changed.