Disable F1 Windows Help and Support on Windows 8.1

One of the most useless things built into windows is the F1 help, unfortunately Microsoft doesn't make it easy to disable. I think I can say that I may have found the F1 help useful once, and that is probably pretty generous.

Below is a Powershell script which will disable the F1 help in windows. Basically, it takes control over helppane.exe and then renames it. Thankfully, if windows can't find the file, it will not through an error. If you want to restore the F1 help, just rename the executable back.

takeown /f c:\windows\helppane.exe
$acl = Get-Acl "C:\Windows\HelpPane.exe"
$rule = New-Object  System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAccessRule("$([Environment]::UserDomainName)\$([Environment]::UserName)","FullControl","Allow")
$acl.SetAccessRule($rule)
Set-Acl "C:\Windows\HelpPane.exe" $acl
Rename-Item "C:\Windows\HelpPane.exe" "C:\Windows\HelpPane1.exe"

This may work on other versions of windows, but I have only tested this on Windows 8.1.