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Firefox apps blocked by group policy

  • 6 svar
  • 1 har dette problemet
  • 26 views
  • Siste svar av trainman261

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I recently checked out Firefox apps, but I am having an odd problem - whenever I try to launch one of them, I get this message: "This program is blocked by group policy. For more information, contact your system administrator." I did some digging, and it turns out this is something that would pop up if you tried to run something on a work computer that your employer didn't want - except, I'm on my personal computer, and my account is an administrator account. I tried running these as administrators, and then they worked - but this shouldn't be necessary, since they aren't doing anything that should require administrator permissions, and I don't want to confirm a UAC prompt every time I launch an app - nor do I want to disable UAC. I did some searching for this specific problem, and I haven't found anyone with this problem I'm having, which is odd. I checked in the group policy editor, and it tells me under Computer Configuration>Windows Settings>Software Restriction policies, that there are no software restriction policies defined under, which should mean that it won't interfere with anything. In case it's relevant, my system is a ThinkPad X230T running Windows 7 64-bit, and there is no reason at all to suspect malware, not to mention my last malware incident was at least a year ago, if not more. Firefox version is 37.0.1, which should be the latest, since I have auto-update on. Any idea as to what is going on?

I recently checked out Firefox apps, but I am having an odd problem - whenever I try to launch one of them, I get this message: "This program is blocked by group policy. For more information, contact your system administrator." I did some digging, and it turns out this is something that would pop up if you tried to run something on a work computer that your employer didn't want - except, I'm on my personal computer, and my account is an administrator account. I tried running these as administrators, and then they worked - but this shouldn't be necessary, since they aren't doing anything that should require administrator permissions, and I don't want to confirm a UAC prompt every time I launch an app - nor do I want to disable UAC. I did some searching for this specific problem, and I haven't found anyone with this problem I'm having, which is odd. I checked in the group policy editor, and it tells me under Computer Configuration>Windows Settings>Software Restriction policies, that there are no software restriction policies defined under, which should mean that it won't interfere with anything. In case it's relevant, my system is a ThinkPad X230T running Windows 7 64-bit, and there is no reason at all to suspect malware, not to mention my last malware incident was at least a year ago, if not more. Firefox version is 37.0.1, which should be the latest, since I have auto-update on. Any idea as to what is going on?

All Replies (6)

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I'm not sure what you mean by "Firefox Apps." Can you post a link to exactly what you were trying to install? I'm going to try to reduplicate this issue, so we can find a solution.

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My apologies for the late reply. What I mean are the apps for the desktop from Firefox Marketplace ( https://marketplace.firefox.com/ ). The apps install fine (without even a UAC prompt), but it's running the apps that doesn't work properly. It happens with every app I try to use, here is a list (that I think is complete, but I'm not 100% sure): https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/youtube-2?src=search https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/soundcloud?src=search https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/fbird?src=search https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/piano?src=search https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/hexgl-1?src=search https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/sprint-club-nitro?src=search https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/bubble-shoot?src=branded-editorial-element

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I see.

Apps are installed in directories under C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\

You can get to this directory by opening the start menu and typing %appdata% and clicking enter. In the Roaming directory you should see some folders with names which start with the app name and end with a long series of letters and numbers, like "Soundcloud-6b3c6d011154f345f6740365d29de1ba" for the Soundcloud app.

If you copy one of these folders to your desktop, can you then open the exe file inside the folder, without getting the group policy error?

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Aha, I think you're onto something, thanks for the idea. I specifically copied the soundcloud folder over to my desktop, launched the EXE, and... voila, it worked. I tried it with a couple of other apps as well, same thing. Now, the only question is why it's still a problem when launched from the proper folder.

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I've never seen anything quite like this before. But my gut says there's a permissions or ownership issue with the roaming folder. You could try right clicking on the folder and selecting Properties. Then go to the Security tab and make sure you have permissions to run and execute things in that folder and all folders recursively.

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I know, it's quite an odd issue. Usually I don't open support threads, because I either find someone else with the same problem who has found a solution, or I figure out a solution myself... but this one has stumped me. So anyway, I went around and played with some permissions, even set the Roaming folder to give full control to all users (before that it was set to give full control to admins, system, and my account), which was probably a stupid idea, but well, it didn't work. I also tried marking everything on a specific app folder as full control to everyone, still no success. I also tried to remove the read-only mark, still nothing.