Suddenly started to get a Couldn't connect to the Group Policy Client service. Why?

I was able to upgrade my new Surface 3 to Windows 10. It's been working fine for a week or so. Then a couple of days ago no one but myself or my wife (the only two in our family who I've made administrators on the Surface) can log into it. Our kids can't log into it at all using their accounts. Any attempt by them to log in results in the following error message:

"Windows couldn't connect to the Group Policy Client service. Please consult your system administrator."

Well, I'm the "system administrator"; and I'm not sure what's going on. I've searched this error and found an article online saying that you've got to get into the Services app and set the startup for the Group Policy Client service to Automatic. (I've checked on the Surface and it's set to Manual.) But that article was for Vista. Is that advise still valid today?

2 Answers

Edit:

I finally found what seems to be a permanent solution to this problem here

1. Open regedit
2. Navigate to key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SVCHOST
3. Create multi-string value named GPSvcGroup and assign it value GPSvc
4. Create a key (a folder) and name it GPSvcGroup
5. Open the newly-created GPSvcGroup folder and create 2 DWORD values:
   • First called AuthenticationCapabilities with a value of 0x00003020 (or 12320 in decimal)
   • Second is called CoInitializeSecurityParam with a value of 1
6. Reboot

After doing this, my Group Policy Client service is running when I boot up

Original solution:

I've been having this problem a lot on both of my Windows 10 computers. It seems to occur every week or so. This always fixes the problem, though only temporarily and only after it's occurred:

1. Open a command prompt as administrator
2. Run sfc /scannow
3. Restart the computer

Even though it always says that no problems were found when I run the sfc scan, it fixes the issue.

Did you try changing the service startup mode? If that works I'd love to know!

I had the "Can't connect to group policy client service" problem for the first time this morning. I opened a Microsoft support chat session and got pretty quick response which looks very very similar to the posting above (interesting).

Unfortunately, I couldn't even run regedit. It, and most other system operations, just hung without responding (I couldn't even go back to the previous restore point). So I didn't try this suggested fix.

Looking at event logs (right click on "start", then event viewer, I think..), I noticed some McAfee antivirus related errors (mcupdate I think). I uninstalled McAfee. After rebooting, everything worked.

So, in my case, McAfee anti-virus might have been the problem. I've searched the web and have not found other people having this McAfee Windows 10 problem, so maybe my problem was a one off.