If they want it, they can turn it on...

Oh, I forgot something (or maybe I'm just looking for excuses to stay up even later). About my "performance tuning" on those Prolineas: I'm sure you're asking "How can you make sure that, when a new user logs in, they are set to "Performance" as well?" I understand your curiosity. After all, when a new user logs into a machine, and they don't have a roaming profile (we don't use them yet), their default settings are to have all the fancy colorful stuff that XP has. I wish I could change that default...

Well, duh, I wouldn't be talking about this if you couldn't. Here's my main "user related" tasks when setting up a new machine (unless I work from an image--which I'm not doing just yet):

1. Setup the machine in a workgroup. It's just easier this way--trust me.
2. Create one extra user (in addition to Administrator). Log in as this user when the time comes.
3. In Control Panel|Users, turn off the "Welcome Screen". It'll get turned off when you add the system to the domain anyway, and it makes the following steps a lot easier.
4. Setup your current user (we'll just call it "User1") the way you want. Themes, Start menu, desktop, background image (or lack thereof), everything. If you want to use the "Send To" trick from my first post, set this up as well for "User1".
5. Log out, and log in as Administrator. Notice how everything is so Windows XP-y, and nothing like you had setup "User1".
6. Go into My Computer properites, to the "Advanced" tab, and click the settings button for "User Profiles"
7. Select your "User1" profile. Click the "Copy To" button. Enter "C:\Documents and Settings\Default User" (of course, if your documents and settings folder is somewhere else, change this path accordingly). Hit OK a couple of times. This copies the "User1" profile--which you setup exactly how you like it--to the "Default User" profile.

At this point, you could add the machine to the domain and be happy. But I like to do a couple more steps:

8. Log out, and log in as User1.
9. Go into My Computer properties, Advanced, and "Settings" in User Profiles. Select the "Administrator" profile, and click "Delete". This deletes the current Administrator profile (not the user ID).
10. Log out, and log in as Administrator. Note how it's your "default" profile now. Cool, huh?
11. Go back to that User Profile settings screen (again), and delete the "User1" profile. Also, go into Users in Control Panel and delete the User1 user. Don't want a local user with Admin rights that doesn't have a password.
12. Now add the machine to the domain.

One thing I haven't been able to try yet is to take a "Default User" profile directory from one machine, and put it on another. Seems like it should work--after all, this is all that Roaming Profiles do. If it does work, then I could have my "Gold" default profile on the network, and just copy it to a machine--effectively skipping pretty much every step above. I could also publish updates to the "default" profile, at the same time deleting all other profiles, to force updates out. But this would just tick off clients--imagine your desktop and start menu just getting wiped out and replaced every couple months.