Drive restriction group policy causes error message when accessing Open and Save As Dialog Boxes on Windows 8.1

Question

We are running Windows 8.1 Pro x86
I am really curious as to why the drive restriction group policy causes the error message to pop up:
"This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator."
It does not prevent from actual saving so functionality is not lost but it really annoys our end users and we're getting a lot of complaints. We cannot use the workaround of hiding drives instead of restricting as this still presents security issues. This
is happens when saving (or clicking on a button like "Browse" that opens the 'Open' dialogue box) in all Office 2013 applications, Internet Explorer, Paint, Notepad, and probably most others. I've looked at many forums and no suggestions for workarounds
have succeeded for us to get rid of this error message and in fact, I read a post that stated that someone contacted Microsoft and they said this was by design and there is no workaround. I find this very unfortunate that we either have the choice of compromising
security or annoying our end users. It seems to me like the new dialogue box in Windows 8.1 (and maybe 8?) attempts to access the local drive under the logged in user's account before it actually opens up the dialogue box which conflicts with the group policy
that restricts access to the drive.
Has anyone at all had any luck getting this to go away without removing the restrictions? It seems like the answer is either buried in the Windows code or somewhere in the registry.
Thank you in advance for your time!

Answer 1

Thank you for your time and response! Unfortunately, we have the machine locked down pretty tight (they are public use computers that require heavy restriction) and it is set to restrict all drives so access is limited to the local profile. We did try
testing your method, however, by adding the Desktop as an allowed location in the Office policy (which would not solve the issue for the other applications but was good for a test) using the path %userprofile%\desktop. When choosing that location, it does
not throw the error but unfortunately, it does not remember like it did for your with the E: drive so it still always throws the error when first loading the dialogue box no matter what I do. If you're able to confirm that this is simply by design and we're
just expected to inform our users to click through the errors, then I guess that's the accepted answer. Although, do you think that there might be a registry key value that is set after you save to the E: drive for the first time? Maybe we could set that value
to %userprofile%\desktop if it's doing the redirection after the first save through registry. Thanks again!