First, I think the differences between Win9x & NT preclude any such type of solution.

Second, I don't fully understand what you are trying to do. How can a user logon before they have an account. Do they log in as "guest" and then get led through a script to create an account? How does this work? As a LAN administrator, this seems too open to abuse for me. Do you really need this function?

Some of what you want to do can be done in Win9x. A script could be written that trapped logons to the guest account & evoked a script that led a user through creation of an account & a share. I do not know any Win9x replacements for XCALS or CALCS so the directory permissions could not be set. The impact of this I am not sure of. As to switching users afterwards I can come up with a reasonable proxy. There are a number of freeware utilities that allow you to re-log in to Win9x. The user would have to re-type in their userid & password but the system would not re-boot. It is rather quick, it only takes a few seconds. Anyway, at the end of your kix script poke this "logon.exe" into the runonce key in the register.

Also if you have a mixed win9x & NT client, you can not let the NT Server User Manager create the so-called shares for you. You must manually (or with a script) create the shares. How the NT user manager creates these so-called user shares is not compatible with Win9x & in my view is an abomination. The user manager does not really create a share. Instead it creates a directory under the globally shared directory "users" (or whatever you called the user directory) then it makes the "userid" the sole owner of this sub-directory. This directory is untouchable by the administrator or anyone else. You can not even look inside it. The only way for the administrator to access the directory is to take ownership, which "smashes" the so-called user share & makes it unusable by the user. You can not hide the sub-directory either. Why Microsoft choose this strategy instead of the one used by everyone else in the industry I do not know. My personal belief is that they choose this approach in an attempt to forces you to exclusively use NT workstation clients with NT server.

Jochen,

As to your comments about Win9x in a LAN environment, I do not agree. There are many things that can be done with Win9x that are difficult to do with NT. Of course, the opposite is also true. On balance I consider the 2 choices almost a saw-off. At least that is true in a school environment.

[This message has been edited by JackLothian (edited 24 May 2000).]