[Samba] Samba and XP professional- system policy issue

[balagopal]

Hi,

A question on windows xp professional and samba. The samba version is 2.2.5. 
After putting an entry for samba pdc in lmhosts and disabling sign or seal in 
the registry, the xp client successfully logged on to the samba domain. But 
ntconfig.pol placed in netlogon,doesnt get applied. But if the remote update 
option is set manually to the netlogon path, the policy gets applied. So the 
nt 4 policy file is still valid for xp, but xp simply doesnt download the 
system policy. In the event viewer, every time the xp machine logs on to the 
domain, an error message appears. According to the message, the xp machine is 
looking for
a group policy object in an active directory domain. Another win2000 client 
works perfectly in the samba domain and downloads system policies. I have 
tried both samba head and tng, in both cases, xp logs on to the domain 
successfully .

So, my doubt is- obviously xp doesnt seem to be supporting mixed mode domains 
by default, or else it wont look for a group policy object as it resides only 
in an active directory domain. Is it possible to somehow make xp download nt 4 
style policies from a samba domain? Does xp professional actually support 
mixed mode?

Another interesting thing- when xp logs on to the samba domain, by default a 
restrictive set of system policies apply, havent seen that with win2000. For 
example- program files and winnt directories have write access disabled, 
system, network etc applets in control panel have all the important settings 
disabled for editing. Quite weird-almost everything that I wanted to with 
system policies from the server, seems to be done by default. xp is driving me 
crazy.

Thank You

Balagopal