As a long time windows 2000 user I've been frustrated by the
difficulty of trying to use the system policy editor to enforce user
based policies. Creating policies at computer level is easy enough if
you have a domain but I have not found a way to create policies at the
user level. I've been told that windows XP pro has a better mechanism
for creating policies at the user level but have not found this tool.
What I'm trying to accomplish is to restrict non-admin users to only a
few programs while giving admin users full access.

Does XP pro handle user based policies better then W2K?

Thanks

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Clarification of Question by mpsi-ga on 05 May 2006 18:08 PDT

What makes this difficult is that we are not running in a Domain
environment. These are two and three (XP pro) machine networks that do
not have a windows "server" OS to act as a domain controller.

This may be helpful:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/rstrplcy.mspx

Best regards,
Rainbow

Here is your solution

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;293655

The best explanation of how to do this: 
http://www.theeldergeek.com/group_policy_for_windows_xp_prof.htm

"What I'm trying to accomplish is to restrict non-admin users to only a
few programs while giving admin users full access."

It sounds like you only want them to run a certain group of programs??
So you could use a gpo in connection with XP to hadle this for you.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310791/en-us

This is MS's prefered way.

To make it easy use the path method.
Install all needed apps under a custom folder then set the path rule
to that folder. Any apps under that would be allowed to run. Nothing
else would be able to launch.