1/9/2008 -- By default, the user portion of Group Policy is refreshed every 90 minutes, with a random offset of 0 to 30 minutes. You can configure Group Policy restrictions to change this value. If this setting is disabled or not configured, the default values are used. It's best not to modify these values, unless you completely understand the ramifications.

Here's the procedure:

1. Open the Group Policy Object.
2. Go to User Configuration, Administrative Templates, System, group Policies.
3. In the right-hand pane, double-click Group Policy refresh interval for users.
4. Change the value from 90 to 120 minutes, and the random offset value from 30 to 45 minutes.

There are two important things to keep in mind. First, this setting can be applied to Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 computers. Second, don't specify a value of 0 minutes, or else the computer will try to update the policy settings every 7 seconds.

The procedure described above shows you how to update the user portion of the Group Policy. For the computer portion, you can modify the similar setting at Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Group Policy.