Unified XP Desktop Build

I have been in the early stages of planning a move to a corporate unified build for our desktop systems. Currently, uers are local admins and have free reign over their systems – excluively WinXP. This causes a good amount of greif for our help desktop support folks – viruses, licensing, supporting the unknown…

But I’ve been hearing a lot of grumbling about taking away local admini prividliges from the users. “We will need to make every little change” “People will hate the loss of authority”

But I can’t help but think that these things would only be temporary hudles to solving our long term problems.

Can you provide any insight or experiences that might help me?