Disabling Software Installation?

[live4spd]

I work at a small office and I'm trying to figure out how to disable the installation of new software. I have group policies enabled and it works, but I don't really see anything to stop users from installing new software.

This is a Win2k domain, and the individual users have "power user" rights on their own system. I've tried making the users just plain old user, but I run into to many "registry editing disabled" error messages.

Is there a way to just disable the Windows Installer Engine?

TIA!

 

[Smilin]

Unless you've been fooling with something power users do not have rights to install most software and drivers. That doesn't prevent anyone form using say a dos based program that doesn't require any permissions though.

You shouldn't need to but if you still need to drop people to just user status you can also install the compat.ws security template to fix 90% of restriction errors you may get. Disabling the Windows installer engine would be a bad idea for a number of reasons including the fact that some things like antivirus, windows update, service packs, hotfixes can depend on it.