Strange LGPO Behavior

[Joe]

I clean installed WXP Professional OEM on a friends Sony VAIO laptop &
tweaked for speed (i.e., turned off System Restore & disabled Indexing on the
drive. A month later I noticed that System Restore had been reenabled & the
ability to disable it was greyed out with "Disabled by Group Policy" in
parenthesis. My friend is a novice & does not belong to any domain & only
accesses the i-Net when visiting me. So I ran GPEDIT.MSC & observed that only
two or three items are listed under Administrative Templates\Windows
Components (i.e., Windows Installer & most other items are missing). Isn't
Windows Installer the place to lock down system restore configuration? I am
quite puzzled as to why I'm only seeing a miniscule subset of the full GPO
listings. I was able to disable System Restore via the Registry. Does anyone
know if there is a GPO file that I can replace to reengage full LGPO
administrative functionality? Note that I installed SP3 from a downloaded ISO
image that I burned to disc after the initial tweaking.

 

[Joe]

After reading through a few MS articles on the subject, I've been able to add
the remaining templates for full Registry-based policy management. I'm at a
loss, however, as to how or why the System Restore configuration was
"Disabled by Group Policy" after installing SP3. Perhaps MS patches non-OEM
differently than it does OEM? Would Symantec's N360 do this? Further thoughts
or comments are welcome.