WinXP Profiles

[TM]

Hi all,

We are replacing some of the Win98 clients with WinXP Pro clients. We've
never enabled user profiles in the previous environment, and would like to
have the desktop and settings behave the way they did in Win98 - one desktop
on the machine, shared by anyone who logs in. In other words, one common
desktop environment on a given machine, regardless of whether fred, or joe,
or administrator logs into that system. I'm sure I'm missing some simple
setting, but if not, is there a way (in the registry, environment variables,
etc.) to point every user who logs onto that machine to a single common
directory under Documents and Settings, so that everyone sees the same
desktop on that system? I guess what we're looking for is the antithesis of
roaming profiles...a single profile sticks with a machine, regardless of who
you are. Roaming (mandatory) profiles take too damn long to log in (never
used to, just started to take longer all of the sudden for some reason).

ps.. win2003 dom (2 domain controllers, couple of file/print) servers..

Any ideas?
Cheers

 

[Scott M.]

Standard Windows XP profiles are resident on the machine but each user will
get their own profile (desktop, start menu, my documents, cookies,
favorites, etc.). This is NOT roaming profiles. You can use the Group
Policy editor and the Administrator account to lock down various aspects of
the profile so that users can't change certain items and that all users will
have certain items, but if you want each user to share all the items
mentioned before, then they would have to share 1 user account. Windows 98
did not support multiple users and therefore it acted as if there was only 1
user who would ever use the machine.