SP2010: "Open with Windows Explorer" option is displayed in the "Actions" menu of Document libraries after disabling Publising feature

Problem description: Open with Windows Explorer option is displayed in the "Actions" menu of Document libraries after disabling Publishing feature

One of our user using a SP2010 team site from a long time. As per the requirements arises, he made some changes in the contribute permissions and activated “publishing feature” also.

What exactly happens?

After changing contribute permission of users to exclude “Use Client Integration Features" option, enabling Publishing feature results “Open with Windows Explorer” action to be available in the “Actions” menu of Document libraries. Later if we disable Publishing feature, that does not prevent users to open Windows explorer through “Open with Windows Explorer” option.

Troubleshooting started:

Let’s do the postmortem of this publishing feature.

Publishing feature is well known feature but it makes drastic changes when we do the activation.

Base location of publishing feature-C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\PublishingSite

Feature Id: F6924D36-2FA8-4f0b-B16D-06B7250180FA

Which features gets activated when we activate SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure at the site collection level:

Name:Publishing Prerequisites

Description: Enable Publishing prerequisites for site collection

Folder name: PublishingPrerequisites

Feature Id: A392DA98-270B-4e85-9769-04C0FDE267AA

Functionality:

This feature enables the publishing prerequisites for a site collection. It doesn’t activate any other features; it just runs the code in the feature receiver to set up a site so it can use the publishing features.

Name:Publishing Resources

Description: Enable Publishing for site collection

Folder name: PublishingResources

Feature Id: AEBC918D-B20F-4a11-A1DB-9ED84D79C87E

Functionality:

This feature enables the publishing resources on a site collection. The publishing resources are site columns and content types and site settings. The feature also contains three feature upgrades that are added to the feature when it gets activated.

Groups created when we activates Publishing feature:

Style Resource readers

Designers

Approvers

Restricted Readers

Quick Deploy users

Hierarchy managers

Cause:

Even after disabling Publishing feature, the groups that are created as part of enabling publishing feature are NOT removed. When enabling publishing feature, by default all users are added to a SharePoint group called “Style Resource Reader” . This group has "Read" permission by default which also includes “Use Client Integration Features" permission level by default. Because of that reason, users will get “Open with Windows Explorer” action in the “Actions” menu of Document libraries.

Workaround/Fix that found:

We only have workarounds for this behavior.

Workaround 1:

Remove “Style Resource Reader” SharePoint group.

Workaround 2:

Create a new SharePoint Group that does not include "Limited Access" permission level for it. Then add required users to that SharePoint group.

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