Win ’98 Policy Issue

Running ’98 on an NT 4.0 network. A group of machines are locked out of control panel, run, settings, etc. Can’t get to run or control panel in safemode. I may have created my poledit disk wrong. I can create a shortcut to a:poledit, but cannot access the disk. I get a path error c:\windows\…\common.adm or something like that. Thanks for your help