autoconfigure new NT4 sp3 clients, samba 1.9.19 server

[mathog at seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu]

Hi,

I'm running the Alpha of 1.9.19 (we needed Samba as a domain controller)
and want to know the best way to set it up so that the first login for a 
new user on an WNT workstation in that domain creates the profile we want
for the user, rather than the one NT seems to want.

1.  The profile created is about .5 Mb in size.  The parts that we want
    in there are maybe 20% of that.  How does NT decide which of this stuff
    gets copied into each user's profile, and from where?  Ie, can we set
    up a default template on the Samba server which will be used instead?

2.  In typical Microsoft shoveware style, each new user gets to suffer
    through the following features:

       A.  A tour of IE 4
       B.  The welcome to WNT series of messages

    How do we shut these off?  (Preferably in the template profile 
    discussed above.)

3.  Navigator 4 has two options for the user specific stuff - default, or 
    a named user.  But we don't see any indications that in can take
    an environmental variable for the path used for the named user.  Ie,
    When our users log into the NT workstations they always see a disk:

      Z:\username

    which is mounted from the Samba server.  We want to be able to tell
    Navigator that the profile is in there, but we don't see how.  Ie,
    we'd like to use something like:

      Z:\$USER\path\path

    so that $USER gets substituted with the real username.  In other words,
    we'd like to let users have their own Navigator profiles, but don't
    want to have to manually create hundreds of specific accounts.  The
    navigator documentation doesn't indicate that this is possible (or that
    it isn't, either.)

Thanks,

David Mathog
mathog at seqaxp.bio.caltech.edu
Manager, sequence analysis facility, biology division, Caltech