Is there a way to have mandatory universal profile that can be applied to a goup policy without going to each user's account to set the profile path?

No - the profile has to be on the user account and is not changeable through GPO. There are two options: 1) The latest version of Active Directory - Users and Computers supplied for Win Server 2003 actually allows **multiple** users to be selected at one time. You can be select which settings that you want to set and redirect the profile path to something like: \\server\profiles\%username% for all users 2) You could use Group Policy to redirect folders. You can select "Redirected Folders" for more important profile subfolders so that they run directly from the server rather than being moved around with the roaming profile. Interestingly Microsoft only provides redirects for certain folders, but if you look through the internet, it's easy enough to write a template for other folders (like favourites) Hope this helps - (probably no 1 is more useful)