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Managing Multiple User Profiles in Windows XP?

Posted by Cliff on from the finding-better-ways-to-do-things dept.

ALC Technician asks: "I work as a computer technician at Ferris State University, and we use Windows based systems for most of our faculty and student computers. We've been running into a lot of issues with user profiles, particularly in Windows XP, such as setting the systems up while logged in as Administrator and getting the configuration to propigate to the standard user accounts. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to give the users appropriate rights to the machine without sacrificing system security?"

3 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Registry, GPO XTEQ by Oriumpor · · Score: 4, Informative

    REGISTRY... yes... that's an easy way to do this... an easier way is a little thing called Policy Objects. If you are running enough XP systems that it warrants the horrible tradeoffs of having an active directory network, GPO's are an easy way to do this (albeit managing them, and making sure the GPO changes propogate on a network can be a pain in the butt.)

    You could also script a global USERS registry change and push it out to a buncha systems... XTEQ X-setup can do this for you, if you aren't adverse to hacking your registries

    Or, quite simply, you could log in as the USER you want to change the options for, (in a limited environment this might be easy enough.)

  2. GPEDIT.MSC by chota · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hi. at UWM, we've run into the same problems. If you're not going to be running a domain, use the group policy editor (available on every Windows XP/2000 machine by default).

    Start, Run, "gpedit.msc", and hit OK.

    This will bring up the group policies for the local computer, which is similar to the domain GPOs. Except, of course, that they won't be over-written by the Domain GPOs because you won't have any.

    Email me if you need more help...

  3. Security Templates by Mike+Dolan · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's a possible suggestion. About 90% of programs fail to run due to either file permission problems (e.g. requiring RWXD to the original program folder), or because they;re trying to write back to HKLM (most of which is RO). Use tools such as regmon and filemon by sysinternals to find the security violations. Then make a judgement call whether or not to modify the security to allow that program to run. Finally, write a security template which you can then apply to all the machines (use SECEDIT to apply). I created a custom template for our machines at work which works very well.... Cheers, Mike