You misunderstand me when I said...
The problem is not that users will change what you set up.
The problem is that when you set these settings and then make the
account anything other than "admin rights" in XP Home, all your
settings are thrown out and it's back to MS duhfaults.
Now do you see the problem?
[/QUOTE]
Yes, I understand what you mean now, but we are using XP Pro and this
has not been the case - the desktop settings remain intact even for
limited accounts. Perhaps a difference between Home and Pro?
Could well be - after all, Pro gives a much more graded control over
account rights, whereas Home just offers a couple or few presets. I'd
have thought the unmodified presets would have worked the same way,
but I suppose MS has to keep kicking sand in Home user's eyes to
punish them from not spending up on Pro
Trouble is, the net result is that most of us don't want anything to
do with non-administrator user accounts in Home.
know, I've only seen one PC with XP Home on it and I removed it from our
network because we're a Netware house and Novell does not support XP
Home (or WinME either).
With me, it's the reverse; in my market it's all Home unless the
lowered incoming connection limit bits peer-to-peer LANs over 5 PCs,
who have to go Pro to get the same limit Win95/98 offered.
All our staff users are setup with admin rights because they routinely
have to re-install several half-baked apps when they break (software
developed "in-house" but not in our house). Student use machines use a
limited account.
OK
I'd be interested to read your comments on why hiding files, extentions
and paths is dangerous. Definitely irritating, that it is.
Well, how can you assess the risk of a file if you can't see what type
of file it is? What's the point o looking for malware files when they
are kept hidden from you?
And there's a "user failure" risk when both your own
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 and your boss's \\BOSSPC\C\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 are
both shown as "SYSTEM32".
I haven't experienced RegMon (perhaps I should) but I did spend quite a
chunk of the day trogging through the registry - you're right, not fun
at all.
The problem with RegMon is there's so much continual "background
radiation" traffic that you get swamped, unless you filter in only
what you want to look at. And if you knew what you wanted to look at
well enough to filter effectively, you wouldn't need RegMon.
I was in a very annoyed state and I'm sorry about that. Dealing with XP
does that to me. I usually do better than that about keeping my bad
attitude from talking here.
It's a battle I lose all the time - and when I feel chirpy, I get
taken to task for writing "non-helpful" (humour) one-liners, like my
reply to the "Buffet Overrun" thread
As I said this doesn't seem to be the case with Pro. I make the changes
manually to an admin profile then copy that profile to Default Users and
all subsequently created users inherit those settings regardless of
account type. Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with Pro but rather
the way I do may be different than you.
Maybe. It's just so tedious cleaning up leftovers from unwanted
accounts that I've not been tempted to retry. I wish MS took user
settings more seriously than they do, they are becoming quite cavalier
since WinME. It matters, when their duhfaults suck as badly as they
so often do. A few examples:
- massive IE cache, repeated for each account!
- dumping incoming junk in the data set (malware-polluted backups)
- NoDriveTypeAutoRun = 95 (HD volume \Autorun.inf dropper attack)
- hide file name extensions, paths etc.
Also, one absolutely has to retain control of "shell folder" locations
in multi-volume setups in particular. TweakUI's the only "front door"
for that, and I still have to RegEdit a few things.
The other killer is an inability to preset the prototype from which
new accounts are spawned. Means that whenever users spawn new
accounts later, they duhfault back to MS all over again.
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Trsut me, I won't make a mistake!
