Problem with Win2k's restricted user and Office XP

I work at a school and we are setting up a Computer lab. The systems are running Win2k. We don't want the student to be able to mess up the systems (add or delete programs etc) I set up a student account that is a restricted user. Since we also don't want the students to be able to save on the HD since they all have network accounts I have it set up that they cannot write or modify the folders in the student account, my documents, start menus etc.

We are using Office XP. When a person is logged on as a student and opens up MSWord we get an error message that Word cannot open the "normal.dot" file. When we close Word it tries to save "normal.dot" but can't because of the way we have it set up.

Does anybody know a work around? MSExcel and Powerpoint are find.

 

just lock them out of my documents and desk top.
Never heard of locking out of the whole HD on a local machine.

 

There are two ways of going about this if I remember correctly.
One is to just allow the document template (normal.dot) to be changed by the user, ie setting the permissions directly on the file rather than on the directory in which it resides.

The other way would be in setting the template directory either on a shared network drive, or to duplicate the templates on the students accounts taking up quite some space.

Another thing is that depending on the amount of software you are using, you will be forced to open more and more directories on your HDD's.
Especially a lot of Adobe programs want to mess with registry keys and directories - it seems as if Adobe wants every user to be, if not member of the "Administrators" group, then at least in "Power Users ".

My colleague have been working on and off for a couple of weeks on a template where every program will work without error messages and correct settings for the students.

ssmith10pn:
I too work at a school where all of the students have access to our computers - and the net, and if we don't clamp the machines as hard as they will go, then we will have divX movies, games and warez, not to mention viruses of all sorts on the machines.
It might work on a general workplace just to lock My Docs and Desktop but it's not ideal in a school.

 

I understand. I forgot how pesky kids are. I had to bar my daughter from mine, She's the only one that can bluescreen it

 

Laage - when you have gotten it all figured out and the machines locked down tight, you should probably award a good grade to the first student who figures out how to bypass every thing you did. Maybe even offer him/her an IT staff position.

And if you do manage a "lock down load" that works, you can sell it for a bunch of money unless your contract with the school prohibits such things.

In my experience, if enough users have physical access to the PC, someone will be able to bypass whatever you have done. Case in point was a user on a diskless work station (as in no floppy or cd drives) who brought in a Hd, opened the case, put in his HD and slaved the other, and gave himself a local account with admin rights. Then remove his HD and set the system back to "normal ".

 

Hiya Newt,

As it is, I'm blissfully relieved of any staffing responsibilities so I can't and won't offer any kind of work to whoever manages to break the barriers we have set up .

However, we don't expect the setups to be bulletproof. Just tight enough that the casual user won't be able to install anything too taxing or anything that demands access to the system directories... besides we have opened a separate partition for the students to save temporary work to. And just having that open partition is actually a godsend because most students won't bother to mess around too much in the system itself as long as they have access to that, so when we need to do housekeeping on the machines we usually just need to reformat that particular partition.

But it's true that anyone competent or dedicated enough will get through... we have an advantage, though, in being a private (high) school in a country where most schools are public.
The students have chosen the school themselves which seems to make most of them more interested in keeping the equipment running - I have not seen the kind of sabotage which is sometimes seen in public schools.

ssmith10pn: Sounds like your daughter has the makings of a fine sysadmin in her .