When I was little we only had one computer and one user account. Every time I would set something up in the Control Panel, or configure a setting, somebody would change it. After a while it became old, so I stopped them from messing with the control panel all together. Here are two methods for disabling the Control Panel so it can’t be run and doesn’t display on the Start menu or in Windows Explorer.
Disable the Control Panel Using Local Group Policy Editor
Go to the Start menu and type in gpedit.msc in the Start Search and click on it.
The Local Group Policy Editor will open. Navigate to User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Control Panel. Double-click on Prohibit access to the Control Panel in the Setting list on the right.
On the Prohibit access to the Control Panel dialog box, select the Enabled radio button.
Go ahead and click Ok and then close the Local Group Policy Editor. Now if someone tries to open the Control Panel they will get this nice little error.
Disable the Control Panel Using the Registry Editor
The second method of disabling the Control Panel invovles tweaking the registry. This will work with all versions of Windows, 7 , Vista, and XP. Just make sure to back up the registry before you get started, don’t want to mess something up! If you don’t want to do it this way, you can do follow the method above.
Go to registry by going to START SEARCH and typing in regedit.exe and clicking on regedit.exe
When the registry opens, you need administrative rights, navigate to the following key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer
Right click in the right pane and select New, DWORD (32-bit) Value from the popup menu.
Rename the value to NoControlPanel and press enter. Then right click on it and go to Modify and change the Hexadecimal value to 1 from 0. It will look like this when you are done:
If you want to re-enable it just go back and change the 1 to a zero.
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