In our environment we are currently moving from Novell with Windows XP to Active Directory with (primarily) Windows 7. One thing we are running into is how to setup computers that are shared between many users. We have computers at front desks that are used by over a dozen users. The way we used to do it is that the Windows Account would automatically log into the same user for every Novell Account that logs in. The desktop, favorites, printers, etc, were the same for everyone and if they requested a change (we also used Deepfreeze) we could make that change on the one account and everyone would be affected. So far, I haven't found a way to do this in our new environment. The ideal way to do this would be to have one local profile that all AD users load. However, we do still want them to have access to their drives that are mapped through the network with their AD usernames Creating a default profile would solve some problems, but then we have 2 options, put on Deepfreeze and then each user will create a profile from that default everytime they log in....or....leave Deepfreeze off and end up with very different derivitives or the defaul profile that we will have to change one at a time in the future if they request a change (new printers, etc). Neither one is ideal. Could anybody give me some advice about what is the best way to do this? Or at least, is there a recommendation from Microsoft about how to handle this situation? Thanks in advance for any advice.

Yay for the Novell move - I feel your pain :-) Probably one way to do it is to create a specific local profile on that machine and turn that into a mandatory network profile which is targeted at that workstation (or group of workstations) using GPO. Then, you can still apply different GPOs to the user objects themselves for drive mappings and anything else user-specific that they need. Hope that helps.