Group Policy | Error “resource ‘$(string.win7only)’ referenced in attribute displayname could not be found”
A couple of weeks ago I was working on a client’s user PC where they couldn’t login to the network or access network resources due to a time difference of more than five minutes between the domain controller and the PC. I had to manually adjust the local clock (and the domain controller’s clock) to align them both up to the correct time.
This shouldn’t have occurred as I had group policies in place to force the domain controller to sync its clock with a number of online NTP servers (and not the default, broken & unreliable ‘time.windows.com’ service), and a separate set of policies to enable NTP services on the domain controller, open a firewall port, and policies to force the local workstations to sync their clocks with the domain controller.
Up until the day of this incident, everything had been working properly like clockwork (see what I did there?). So I reviewed the policies and noted that the policies appeared to be corrupted and missing the defined information I had set, and also missing entirely the option to use NTP – wasn’t even in the drop down list of time providers! Head scratching, I thought this was weird. Did a very quick Google search, removed and recreated policies – only to find while creating the policies, NTP was still not an option! Server reboot should fix everything – wrong!
Decided to leave it for a while… Revisiting the issue today, looking at settings in my own domain controller to see what the settings were meant to be (as I could no longer find the correct place on the offending server (Windows Server 2008 R2), only to find I have a problem on my domain controller too! But this time, I was actually getting some useful information (I guess because I’m running Windows Server 2012 R2??)…
Error:
resource ‘$(string.win7only)’ referenced in attribute displayname could not be found
Thought to myself “hmm, that’s weird, I’m sure mine are still working…” but to be honest, I actually haven’t used a Windows computer of my own in my house for a little while now… So I decided to investigate further as I now have some useful information to go off. After a little search, I found an article (which I will include below) which someone had a similar issue and after lodging a case with Microsoft, had found they ran into this problem after installing the Windows 10-1803 templates, which I too had done at both sites, and their workaround was to roll back to the build 1511 templates – which I didn’t feel was the right answer as there are settings being used that appear in the 1803 but not 1511 versions.
Further down the article, another user (loosely used term for a system administrator), had decided to just open up the relevant ADML file and insert the missing string from the previous version into the current version and voilà – working again! Of course, I tested on my own domain controller before rolling the change out to the client’s production environment…
Here’s the change – open the template AMDL file (from the templates store) searchocr.amdl in a text editor such as Notepad++ or Sublime Text and locate (around line 25) the following:
<string id=“OCR”>OCR</string> <string id=“OCREveryPage”>Force TIFF IFilter to perform OCR for every page in a TIFF document</string>
Now, in between these two lines, insert the missing line of text:
<string id=“Win7Only”>Microsoft Windows 7 or later</string>
Should now read as:
<string id=“OCR”>OCR</string> <string id=“Win7Only”>Microsoft Windows 7 or later</string> <string id=“OCREveryPage”>Force TIFF IFilter to perform OCR for every page in a TIFF document</string>
Save and close the file, close and reopen Group Policy management console… Should be fixed!!
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