Removing Local Admin Rights...

["Jay Lopez" <jlopez_si86 () hotmail com>]

I currently work for an organization with approximately 25,000 Windows 
XP/2000 desktops in an Active Directory (AD) environment.  Security from an 
OS and individual application component (i.e., Outlook 2003, MS Office, IE, 
etc.) perspective is being managed via group policy objects (GPO's).

Currently, we are pushing to remove local administrator access rights to 
individual machines to prevent users from randomly installing unapproved 
applications, prevent malware from being silently installed within the local 
administrator context, etc.  Prior to our move to AD and GPO's, we received 
push-back on removing local admin rights for reasons such as the logon 
scripts would not work, etc.

By chance, have any of you implemented any of the above--especially the 
removal of local administrator rights?  If so, what support issues did you 
experience?  What impact did removing local admin rights have?

I'd like to provide as many pros and cons back to our team based on your 
feedback.

Thanks in advance,

Jay Lopez

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