All of my users are local admins of their machines.  this just makes life easy.  I ran into a problem, though, when users started clicking around stuff in the system tray (windows update, specifically).  I'd like to hide the notification area JUST on the remote server.  But the GPOs I'm making seem to follow the login, not the computer.  I have to set the GPO on a container with users, and then it applies to all computers.  Help!

Create a Separate OU for this Remote Server and link this policy only to that OU. In Security Filtering, add the intended Users.

See Similar - http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/0b288be8-f63e-4349-b163-0eddf250e28d/apply-gpo-user-configuration-settings-only-to-specific-computers

if you want to have specific settings apply to users only when they logon to specific computers, you will need to consider using GP Loopback Processing.

Loopback Processing is set in a GPO, and that GPO is linked to the OU where the computer object resides.
This situation causes GP settings (which are within a GPO linked to the computer) to apply to a user of that computer.
This way, you can have differing user settings apply to the user, dependent upon which computer they are logging in to.

Normally, GPOs applied to a user will "follow" that user to all computers that are used by that user.

You may also be able to achieve your goal by investigating the use of Item-Level-Targeting within GPP.