Policies

Policies, a feature new to NT 4.0, aren't really a part of NT's security model. Individual applications and components define policies. Policies are similar to privileges in that they are rights granted to user accounts. For example, NT Explorer has a set of policies that administrators can control to allow or deny users the ability to move icons around their desktops, set their desktop backgrounds, or have a Run entry on their Start menus. The System Policy Editor (SPE) is a tool administrators use to create policy profiles and apply them to specific machines or across a domain. NT stores policy values as Registry keys. For example, many of Explorer's policies are in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ Policies key. When NT Explorer starts, it reads the values of its policies and allows only specified rights