Disabling Windows Script Host

Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Scripting Guide

In more desperate circumstances, you can disable Windows Script Host; this will prevent users from running any scripts (including VBScript and JScript scripts) that rely on WSH.

To disable Windows Script Host, create one of the following two registry entries (REG_DWORD) and set the value to 0 (you need to create the entry, because it does not exist by default). To disable WSH for a particular user, create this entry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Script Host\Settings\Enabled

To disable WSH for all users of a particular computer, create this entry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows Script Host\Settings\Enabled

When enforced, the following message will be displayed any time a user attempts to run a WSH script:

Windows Script Host access is disabled on this machine. Contact your administrator for details.

This message box appear even if the user attempts to start the script from a batch file or using a designated script host (for example, by typing cscript.exe c:\scripts\myscript.vbs at the command prompt).