Error: '[5] Access is denied.' when disabling "Set News and Interests" Taskbar widget

[garlin]

More users are encountering Error: '[5] Access is denied.', when trying to disable the "News & Interests" taskbar widget.

This is not an NTLite fault. Later versions of the W10 & 11 Monthly Updates have pushed out the User Choice Protection Driver (UCPD).

Contrary to the feature's name, UCPD isn't about protecting your own choices. In fact, it's designed to prevent you from making specific reg changes to certain settings like the default File Type Associations and various Taskbar settings, from outside of the Settings App.

Until you disable UCPD on the host system, NTLite cannot apply those changes to the Taskbar defaults.

1. Open a CMD window as Administrator, and run:

sc config UCPD start=disabled
schtasks /change /Disable /TN "\Microsoft\Windows\AppxDeploymentClient\UCPD velocity"

2. Restart Windows.
3. Run NTLite, and re-apply your intended changes.

If you're preparing a new image, don't forget to remove User Choice Protection Driver from the Components list so this condition doesn't repeat itself on your new install.

 

[nuhi]

Thanks Garlin, will see about a workaround as it happens only on Live modifications, and will post here when done.

 

[garlin]

Thanks Garlin, will see about a workaround as it happens only on Live modifications, and will post here when done.

Actually if you update an offline reg hive with the banned keys, UCPD will throw a write error. It’s doing a ridiculous substring match, and doesn’t care if TaskbarDa is mounted on HKLM\NLTmp or not.

If you look at the online code disassemblies for UCPD, it’s not even doing regex’s. Just straight up string compares. Which means by simply renaming reg.exe or whatever NTLite is calling as another filename will avoid the permission error.

Check out: UserChoice Protection Driver – UCPD.sys

 

[tistou77]

Yes nuhi, with the latest ISOs, this error must be present in Offline too (but not tested myself)
No worries with our ISOs 26100.1 + integrated LCU + TaskbarDa option

View attachment 12957

<Settings>
            <TweakGroup name="DesktopTweaks">
                <Tweak name="Advanced\TaskbarDa">0</Tweak>
            </TweakGroup>
        </Settings>

 

[garlin]

This isn't a true test of the actual condition. You need to confirm if the NTLite host has UCPD running or not.

If you've removed UCPD from the image before installing your current host, as I suspect you may have, then it's not an issue. But most users don't know UCPD exists since it was only rolled out in March 2024.

The problem has nothing to do with a specific image, it will return an error on any loaded Windows image. The problem exists with the NTLite host.

 

[tistou77]

Ah yes maybe, all my host no longer have this component

 

[nuhi]

NTLite build 10089 or newer has this fixed.
Make sure to resave the preset, tweak signature has changed.