Chrome extensions managed by organization <== cannot remove this

bbinnard · 10 Jan 2020

My system is Win10/64 Home Build 18363.535 running the current version of Chrome. Chrome is telling me that my extensions are managed by my organization. But I am the single admin user on a personal PC and have no organization.

None of the things I've tried by searching for solutions to this have worked:

1, Delete & reinstall Chrome (twice)
2. Reset Chrome settings
3. Run delete_chrome_policies.bat
4. Run Chrome's cleanup tool (because it is not installed on my system)
5. Delete all contents of ...AppData\Birk\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data & reinstall Chrome
6. Run MBAM

Google searches show a number of people who have had this problem over the past few months, but none of the posted solutions, including ones from Google, have worked or done anything that I can detect.

What should I do to try to fix this?

dalchina · 10 Jan 2020

Hi, this is a seemingly rational account: naturally I've no idea what you've already read. That's a typical problem in trying to guess what to suggest, as you can imagine.

You may be better seeking help on a Chrome-specific forum.

Why Does Chrome Say It’s “Managed By Your Organization?”

More:
Chrome Saying It's Managed by Your Organization May Indicate Malware
https://www.askvg.com/fix-your-brows...google-chrome/

bbinnard · 10 Jan 2020

Yup - been there/done that. No joy. The registry keys were empty, but I deleted them anyway. The chrome://policy page shows nothing helpful.

It's almost 3 AM and I'm calling it a night.

dalchina · 10 Jan 2020

Thank you for your reply.

If registry settings are responsible your steps 1-6 may well not have removed them.

Do you have Home or Pro?

What does this show?

head to the chrome://policy page—just type or copy and paste that address into Chrome’s location box. This will show you both policies set by software on your system and policies set by your organization. You can click the name of each policy to view technical information about it on Google’s website. If you see the “No policies set” message here, that means no policies are managing Chrome on your system.

And this?
You can find some more information at chrome://management —just type that address into Chrome’s location bar.

Confirm you've looked at both of these:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Google\Chrome
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Google\Chrome The correct key to go to will depend on the "Applies to" field shown in the above image. If it states "Machine", you would go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key and if it states "Current user", you would go to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER key.

Extensions
Your post concerns this so perhaps you can identify the entension(s) you can't remove:
How to remove a managed Google Chrome extension?

Basically you'll need to investigate and post what evidence you have. Bear in mind that whilst some may use Chrome here, your issue is with the browser rather than the O/S

bbinnard · 10 Jan 2020

Thanks (again) for your help with this nasty issue. It turns out the solution was quite simple. All I had to do was remove BOTH registry keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Google\Chrome.

I thought I had done this last night, but I actually had removed only the first one. After taking out the second one the message about "managed by your organization" stopped showing up.

What's interesting/peculiar about all this is that both registry keys were empty. So in theory it shouldn't have made any difference if they were there or not. I don't understand why that is, but oh well. I also don't understand why (or how) so many people encounter this problem: one of the message threads I looked at last night had 91 postings, all saying about the same thing. And there were postings from both Windows and Mac users. I found the post about the 2 keys in that thread (somewhere), but I'm not sure I could locate it again.

Anyway, thanks for your help. Maybe I can return the favor some day.

dalchina · 10 Jan 2020

glad it worked out.