I think it depends on the company you work for. Being that I started at the bank in 1991 when all we had was dummy terminals hooked up to a few AS/400 mainframe computers, I was there to watch the evolution into Wintel boxes. I was also there to test the limits and watch policies evolve as more and more computer savvy users started to use the system.
In the early days (1993-1995) you had unlimited access to all network drives, all personal folders, all company documents, everything. If it was on the network, you had access. And I did revel in roaming around. After Windows 95 came out, we switched to a more controlled Novell environment. You could still run everything but now certain servers were restricted.
By 1998 with the year 2000 bug looming and machines being fitted with even more security policies with the advent of Win98, you now could only access your own personal or department data on the network, with unlimited use of your C drive.
By the time I left the company, the only people that had hard drives were people that needed them (and you had to really justify it). Over 90% of our 1000 users had tiny network terminals running crippled versions of Windows CE with no user supplied data ports / storage. Alot of that had to do with controlling access, storage and copying capability of digitized documents of sensitive customer loan and banking data (to comply with new more stringent bank secrecy, consumer privacy and data security laws that exposed the company to a high degree of liability).
