Enabling powershell to run scripts with registry permissions.

As part of my powershell work I obviously need to run powershell scripts. I tried to run one last night and got the usual message about scripts needing to be signed. I had previously changed the settings on my XP machine, but this was obviously the first time I had run a script on my Windows7 machine.

Running the usual “set-executionpolicy remotesigned” I got the following error message “Execution Policy Change. The execution policy helps protect you from scripts that you do not trust. Changing the execution policy might expose you to the security risks described in the about_Execution_Policies help topic. Do you want to change the execution policy?”

Answering Yes to the prompt I then got the following error message – “Set-ExecutionPolicy : Access to the registry key ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell’ is denied”. Sure enough I don’t have permission to this registry key.

I checked with our admin to ensure this wasn’t set in group policy before I started fiddling around. Found out that there is another setting that is user specific that can be set with “Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned”

After doing this I was then able to run scripts, and more importantly my profile script runs. Seeing as though this is my workstation I don’t really care about anyone else’s powershell scripts on my machine 😉

However, if you want to set it for all users, then set the Scope Parameter to be LocalMachine

To set it domain wide, you need to download the PowerShell group policy templates from Microsoft and follow the instructions to set up a policy.