Disabling NETBIOS on windows 2008 server effects group policy

[Ranchero]

Can anyone tell me how to remove NETBIOS traffic in my office. I have disabled "TCP/IP NETBIOS helper" for that under services of my Windows 2008 standard domain controller. But all of a sudden, the group policies stopped working and giving me error "Failed to open group policies, The network path was not found". When I enable NETBIOS service, then group policy works properly. How do I stop NETBIOS traffic? Thanks for any information.

[Bon-Z]

Disabling this service really has nothing to do with "stopping" NetBIOS traffic. This service's primary responsibility is to translate DNS-style names into UNC paths so that the client can understand how to find a resource. In this case, because GPO settings are partially stored in SYSVOL, which is a DFS path, the GP client needs to resolve that DFS path into a UNC path that it can use to find the GPO's files. Disabling does nothing for you other than break GP processing :)