I'm new to mandatory profiles and GPOs so please bear with me. We are setting up a computer lab (all machines running Vista) at a school. All users (students) will have Active Directory accounts and will use these when they login to a lab computer.

What we want is to not have the computers create a new profile each time a student logs into the machine for the first time, since over the course of a semester a machine may be used by a couple of hundred of different users. I've been reading about mandatory profiles and see that you use these to establish a persistent user environment for each user.

I have a couple of questions:

1. Am I thinking about this right--that I would create a mandatory profile following MS instructions, and then each student who logs in would use this profile and no individual profiles would be created?

2. Is there a way to prevent the creation of individual profiles for each user just using GPOs in AD?

3. If not, and a mandatory profile needs to be created, can I point to this profile within AD, or do I need to set this in the User Profiles section of the Advanced Systems Settings on each machine (we would use an image)?

Thanks for the help!