XP pro is a monster

I have an XP Pro qustion here. I got me new i9100, rebuilt 'er with XP pro and did all the stuff, read alot and followed almost all the recommendations.

I would describe myself as much more than a casual user and probably a barely competant power user but certainly not an expert. I have had XP pro once before on a different machine, but I only flitted around and didn't really dive into the black lagoon to shake flippers with the creatures....but now I am.

I partitioned for the first time and I set up accounts (4) and purused Group Policies and other stuff.
Now, what I don't get is: if I load a program as Administrator, it's available (as I have it) to other accounts, but each account must configure it separatly...now is there a way to set it up so it can be configured once and all accounts live with it that way?

Three of the four accounts are mine..Admin, General Use, and an automatic logon / net connect account. It seems very time consuming, for example, to set up Real Audio with play lists and such, then have to do it 2 more times just to get some background music whilst I'm doing ma' thing; but it applies to lots of other issues too. Power downs; I have to set each account up the sameish....it seems to me there must be a global method to accomplish this. Anyway, I've been reading and I keep getting sidetracked on other stuff as I go so I'm not solving my issue here so I thought I'd try to cut to the chase.
Anyone?

wilson23

I did it because of the reading I had done, specifically that surfing the net should not be done under the Administrator account. That made sense. So there is the Admin account, my general computing account and the third is an autologon account. That is, I have the unit set to come on automatically (thru the bios), logon to an account, fire up iexplorer, auto connect (I have dialup at the moment) and log on to the weather....every weekday. I did this with a separate account for security reasons as well as I like using netscape, but I could only autolog to the net with iexplorer. This account has very limited access to the computer, where as my general computing account has medium access and Admin..well you know. I am kind of experimenting here, and I just wanted to try and control the whole the system rather than account by account....but maybe as you describe, it isn't alway feasible.

I'm still trying to get a handle on configuring XP and how far to go. You can go pretty far if you want....but I don't want to spend the rest of my life configuring everytime I rebuild the machine. Still, I'd like to learn more about it.

Thanks for the reply
wilson23