It's all down to the order in which the group policies are processed, and herin loopback processing is the key
1) local - these are the built in policies on all xp installs
2) site - if you have multiple sites configured (physical locations) you can attach a policy to each site
3) domain - the primary default gp
4) OU - each OU inwards until it reaches the one that contains your computer or user account
Finally, computer accounts process their GPs on startup, while user accounts apply theirs at logon
You can view the precise order in which the policies have been applied using the resultant set of policy logging
right-click the computer in question (make sure its on and connected to the domain) go to all tasks, and resultant set of policy logging
in the wizard, it will ask you to pick a user account (one of the cached profiles from when that user logged into the machine)
It will produce what looks on first sight to be a gp editor, but you will notice the only gp options listed in it are the ones that have been configured by the gps that affect that computer/user combination.
if you right-click on either computer or user configuration, and go to properties, you will see a list of the policies that have been applied.
This is where the penny should begin to drop.
the policies are applied in a sequence from bottom to top.
imagine layering stencils, one on top of another. If the very bottom policy has a setting configured, and all the ones above it are not configured, then that setting will shine through all the way to the top.
If all of them have a certain setting configured, then it goes through in sequence and the one at the top is the winner.
What you will see is that the computer gp is below the user gp, because the computer gp was processed when the machine started and the user gp was processed when they logged in. Therefore its the user gp that wins out.
How do I put the computer setting above the user setting? The answer is inside the gp you have applied to your computers
in the computers group policy, go to administrative templates, system, group policy
you should find a setting called "user group policy loopback processing mode"
If you enable this setting, the group policy processing makes a copy of the computers gp, and sticks it on top of the stack ABOVE the user policy that was processed, meaning the settings defined in the computer gp win out.
In real terms, this means that the computers gp is re-processed whenthe user logs in, AFTER the user gp has been processed.
There are two modes for this, replace, and merge.
replace will wipe all the user gp settings clean, so that only the computer gp settings come through. Handy for specialist computers that you want configured in a specific way, no matter who logs in, but not if there are some settings you still want to apply by user.
merge will simply apply the computers gp atop of the user gp.
Be careful though. any settings applied in the computer gp will overwrite the settings in the user gp.
If it is JUST that setting you want to override the users gp settings, I would suggest creating a second group policy on the computers OU, and specify just the homepage, and the loopback proccessing in merge mode
that will do the trick
