How frequently are Security Policies applied?
As we have seen, Group Policy updates are dynamic and occur at specific intervals in the background. If there have been no changes to Group Policy, the client computer still refreshes the security policy settings at regular intervals for the Group Policy object (GPO). If no changes are discovered, GPOs are not processed, but the security policies are. For security policies, there is a registry value that sets a maximum limit of how long a client can function without reapplying non-changed GPOs. By default, this setting is every 16 hours plus the randomized offset of up to 30 minutes. Even when GPOs that contain security policy settings do not change, the policy is reapplied every 16 hours. Although we have never seen a reason to change this interval, the following article describes how to configure this. http://support.microsoft.com/?
