Most of these settings can be controlled by group policy or registry settings. This really just illustrates how serious they are about not breaking compatibilit

Most of these settings can be controlled by group policy or registry settings. This really just illustrates how serious they are about not breaking compatibility with the widest variety of software. If you are having issues with users being able to change things like this on modern windows systems you need to look into removing their permissions on the host. Since XP most of the kinds of settings like the one described in this old article require admin permissions to change. Maybe that's not an option for you...I get that. You are right, though, about supporting lots of users...there are always going to be local config that makes that hard when they can change so much of the system. The upcoming universal platform makes that less likely, but it's definitely a hard problem.