The processing of Group Policy Failed. Event 1096.

After the WSUS migration, I have changed Group Policy responsible for the WSUS server name and other related settings. After some time I have noticed that some of our clients did not migrate to the new WSUS server. After investigation, I could see that the Group Policy is not applying to several machines.

Once I have tried to manually update the Group Policy on the affected machine using command prompt and gupudate /force command the following error message appeared:

Computer policy could not be updated successfully. The following errors were encountered:

The processing of Group Policy failed. Windows could not apply the registry-based policy settings for the Group Policy object LocalGPO. Group Policy settings will not be resolved until this event is resolved. View the event details for more information on the file name and path that caused the failure.

User Policy update has completed successfully.

Once I have checked the event viewer I could see the Event ID error 1096, with the same error message I got in the command prompt.

To solve this issue I had to delete the Registry.pol file because WSUS policy settings are written to the registry.

Registry.pol file is located in a hidden folder. To access this folder, type the following path in the run prompt or Windows Explorer:

C:\Windows\System32\GroupPolicy\Machine

Delete the Registry. pol file.

Now you can run the gpupdate /force command again and the policy should be updated successfully. With the group policy update, the registry.pol file will be re-created.

Hope this helps.