Server 2012/Windows 8 – Ribbon UI: Disable Icons, Buttons, Shortcuts, Tasks, and Commands

To disable a Ribbon UI icon, button, shortcut, task, or command, it requires a combination of registry keys. Some of which must be added to the registry, other keys merely need to be edited if they already exist. In cases where I’ve added the “MUIVerb” column in the table below, the only reason I am adding this key is because once you disable the icon, for whatever reason the icon description is missing so it looks fairly strange to have a grayed out icon without a name under it. Here is the location of the Ribbon UI stuff in the registry:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CommandStore\shell

All of these registry keys use the same values throughout so I’m just going to place an X in the column below whether you need to set it or not. Also, I don’t have that kind of time to be able to test every single one of these entries, however, I would like to see this table completely filled at some point and I can only do that with your help. If you figure out an entry that I haven’t documented yet here, please take the time to quickly email me the info containing all the necessary info at webmaster@thisdomain.com with a subject line of “Ribbon UI”. I will ask one more thing of you, since at the time of this writing, this is literally the only place on the internet you will find this information (and I searched online for days) because I figured it out all by myself, if this page helped you out, please give me a thumbs up vote at the bottom of the post. I intend on adding some sortable post rating functionality to the site and I need feedback.

• First you need to take ownership and grant write permissions to the local SYSTEM account to the CommandStore > shell > Windows.* subkeys in the registry to be able to push these settings out via Group Policy Preferences, or to manually set these keys, take ownership and grant permissions to the user account your logged on as. Currently, I haven’t figured out a way to do this solely with Group Policy without having to call some external batch file that uses some third party software to take ownership and set the registry permissions. Not to worry though fellow tech nerds, I’ve taken all of the guesswork out of the process and went ahead and published my batch script for taking ownership and changing the permissions on the registry keys, you can download that here.
• Set “AttributeMask” REG_DWORD key to “00100000” hexadecimal.
• Set “AttributeValue” REG_DWORD key to “00100000” hexadecimal.
• Set “ImpliedSelectionModel” REG_DWORD key to “00000000” hexadecimal.
• “ExplorerCommandHandler” REG_SZ key will contain a CLSID value such as “{f7300245-1f4b-41ba-8948-6fd392064494}”. Edit the data and completely delete out the CLSID value, which will set the variable to a null or empty string. ie Set “ExplorerCommandHandler”=””.
• MUIVerb is the icon’s text description string. As mentioned above, in cases where the icon’s text is removed when it is disabled, you can add this key to set it’s value. Example: Windows.Cleanup – Set REG_SZ “MUIVerb”=”Cleanup”
• For whatever reason, if you wanted to change the button’s icon, you can set the path in the “Icon” key.
• The Group Policy Exists column tells whether there is a Group Policy that can control access to this setting at the time of this writing. If it does exist, you should use that instead of hacking the registry so that the command isn’t disabled for all users on the machine. Hacking it to lock it down should be used as a last resort and we should all admonish Microsoft for their lack of thoroughness (except when it comes to spying on people, tracking and cataloging users, building in backdoors, and releasing security updates to the NSA first so they can hack our computers before the patches are released).