Windows Server 2012 R2 VMs and the Network Location wizard

With Win2012 R2 VMs deployed with vCloud Director there was the annoyance of having the Network Location Wizard popup on 1st Login, asking to discover new networks. Answer ‘Yes’ and things were fine, answer ‘No’, and *BAM* not RDP.

A quick search points to a TechNet article for turning this off for Windows 2008 R2 and Windows Server 7 for all users or current user. As there maybe multiple users logging in I wanted the ‘all users’ option, which called for the following steps:

1. Click Start, and then click Run.
2. In the Open box, type regedit, and then click OK.

   Registry Editor opens.

3. In Registry Editor, click Edit, click New, and then click Key.
4. Type the following registry entry:

   HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network\NewNetworkWindowOff

1st things first, there’s no Start in Windows 2012 R2. OK, you can just open a cmd window and type in regedit, that’s not a problem. Once in regedit I tried steps 3 & 4 and was greeted by:

#ShowStopper

I next tried just drilling down to the location specified and was of course able to create a key there as there were no “\” in the name.

#Success, right?

I thought so, and went about a reboot, clean shutdown, adding it back to the Catalog, and then deploying back to ‘My Cloud’. Guess what I saw on my 1st Login?

#Grrrr

Now what? I went back to my search and checked a few other sites and most of them pointed me back to the same TechNet page or something similar. There were a few pointers to Forums that wanted me to download a Reg Key, umm, that would be ‘No’. I did find something that looked promising here, that looked interesting.

Just using a simple ‘reg add HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Network\NewNetworkWindowOff’

It was the same desired result the TechNet article alluded to, but Windows being Windows, I thought giving this method a try was worth the time, the little it would take to open cmd and paste that puppy straight in.

Turns out that it did the trick, after the reboot, shutdown, add to catalog, and add to ‘My Cloud’ shuffle I’ve not seen the Network Location wizard again…back to OZ/Redmond with you sir!