Local Policy and AD

Is there anyway to implement local policy on each XP SP2 PC in an AD environment. I have created some templates which will eventually be deployed using group policy. But as of now, our organization would like to implement them at the local policy level on the PC’s? I tried doing this, but my settings will not stay. In essence, I want the local computer policy to override Group Policy. We only have default policies in place. Is the default domain policy overriding my settings locally and can this be changed? Thanks