it seems that I have finally gotten Group Policy to work properly. Now I guess I'm wondering what do I exactly do with it? I was wondering where I could find best practices or what to actually implement. I've got some books, but I guess I wanted to know from a practical sense what I need to optimize group policy. Have any useful links? I haven't been able to find any. Thanks in advance.

What is the goal that you hope to accomplish from implementing group policy?

possibly any thing that could bring down the network, ie.. viruses, I'm thinking about not letting people execute certain file ext. or running active x installer. maybe restricting visits of certain websites. this may be off topic, but I've made everyone a Domain Admin. We are running an application called Abacus Law and everyone runs this program off a shared drive on the my win2k3 server. if I don't make everyone a domain admin certain screens on Abacus Law will not show all fields. I really don't understand this part. so people are able to install anything they want. any thoughts? thank you so much...

I would make it a priority to remove everyone from the Domain Admins group. Contact the manufacturer of the software that you use to find exactly what permissions a user needs in order to operate the software properly. Software vendors are usually pretty helpful because they want you to continue to purchase their proprietary goods. After that is worked out, then I would move on to group policies. Problems should always be fixed and not just worked-around (when possible).

thanks for the direction, I will deal w/ this application problem first. unfortunately we no longer have support for it, plus I don't even know if it was meant to be on a win2k3 domain. (Abacus Law 2003) but nonetheless, this is our main software program for about 20 users.