domain and local profiles

we are a small business that had employees that all worked from home on our laptops but now we have a central office. i've set up a domain controller for security purposes and eventually want to add exchange. the problem i'm having is that i need to figure out a way to let the employees have access to their local profile settings while logged onto the domain because they already have so much data associated with their local computer profiles. i've tried copying the local profile to the domain profile in system properties but that does not work. i also tried a microsoft KB article that said to copy the whole profile folder in explorer, except ntuser.dat and a few other files, and paste it directly into the other profile folder. when i did this and logged into that profile, i got many errors from norton and other programs. am i trying to do something that is not possible?