Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) crashing when generating settings report for a massive baseline policy GPO

Laura Mayer 40 Reputation points
2026-06-09T07:53:27.7866667+00:00

Hello everyone, I am attempting to run a settings documentation report for our master corporate workstation security baseline GPO. Whenever I select the group object inside gpmc.msc and click the "Settings" tab, the management console freezes for 3 minutes and then crashes completely to desktop with an unhandled memory exception error log.

Windows for business | Windows 365 Enterprise
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Answer accepted by question author
Harry Phan 33,315 Reputation points Independent Advisor
2026-06-09T08:07:38.3866667+00:00

Hello Laura,

What’s happening here is that the Group Policy console is struggling to display such a large and complex baseline in its built‑in viewer, so it freezes and crashes. The easiest way around this is to skip the console and use PowerShell instead. Running Get-GPOReport -Name "<your GPO name>" -ReportType HTML -Path C:\Temp\Baseline.html will generate the same settings report quickly without crashing. If the baseline is extremely heavy, consider splitting it into smaller GPOs, but in most cases the PowerShell report solves the issue.

Harry.

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