A question about NT Domains

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Thu, 9 Apr 1998, Wolfgang Ratzka wrote:

> >>>>> "LKCL" == Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at switchboard.net> writes:
> 
>     LKCL> the registry settings in USER.DAT or NTuser.DAT overwrite
>     LKCL> the previous user's settings, leaving any settings _not_ in
>     LKCL> the current user's profile as-is.  what _should_ happen is
>     LKCL> that the old user's settings should be totally wiped out
>     LKCL> prior to putting the new settings in.
> 
> Can this be true? NTuser.DAT corresponds to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER
> branch of the registry tree. If you log out, that part is unloaded. If
> another user logs in, his NTuser.DAT is loaded. Of course, whatever
> you have changed in the registry outside your HKEY_CURRENT_USER will
> remain.

certainly for Win95, this is definitely not the case.  when the user logs
out, the "default" user.dat (c:\windows\user.dat - attributes r,s,h are
set on this file) is loaded.

this causes the classic problem apparent and confirmed as apparent in all
versions of Win95 up to OSR2, for example, of locking the keyboard (you
can press esc and tab: that's about all) in the user/password/domain
dialog, if a user changes their settings to UK _after_ installing (by
mistake) with the default of US keyboard. 

i suspect that the same thing happens with NT, namely that the "default
user" NTuser.DAT is loaded in when a user logs out, rather than unloading
the current HKEY_CURRENT_USER, as one might expect to happen.

>     >> With NT5/Hydra, NT will support multiple simultaneous users via
>     >> WinTerms.
> 
>     LKCL> excellent!  you thinking of tackling multiple domains on the
>     LKCL> same box, too?
> 
> They're introducing "Active Directory", adding an X.500-like
> hierarchy, which in turn should allow setups not entirely unlike
> multiple domains on one server.

hm.  not convinced.  i'll find out soon enough, though.

luke