I understand how o use roaming progiles, and can get a user to login on one machine, add some icons to thier destop, logout go to another XP machine, login and the profile follows, with the icons.

My question is..

The Situation
I'm an ICT Teacher for 12 grades, each grade is going to be using different software over the next year, I want the students to only have access to the applications they need, so a Year1 student would have maybe TuPaint and tuxtype (for Example) on thier desktop profile, but Year 12 students will have neither of those apps, they would see OpenOffice, Paint.net Inkscape and Audacity (for Example)

Now most of these apps need to be installed locally, which is fine in an ICT Lab with 10 Pc's however the school is about to invest in a WiFi network, and the students will be able to login using thier ID on any PC in the school and have access to the applications thier year group requires. I don't relish the thought of installing all these apps on all 50 Pc's as i have enought problems finding the time to write lesson plans.

Question

Could someone point me in the right direction, so that i can setup Group profiles, and thos profiles when the student logs in check to see if the software is loaded, and if not loads the software in its default location, and allows the student access to it..

One possible solution was to put a check script as part of the logon.bat and each time the user logs on, the script would look in c:\flags if there is a .flag file there for the software thier group requires

example

The script is told to look in c:\flags for a file audacity.flg (a simple text file content not important) if audacity.flg is not there, then load audacity. if audacity.flg is there then don't load the app..

Another possible was to set the program files directory to be on the linux server, load the apps from there, so the XP icon points to the linux server, but i think that might put too much pressure on the wifi networ loading apps over it?

I would REALLY REALLY appreciate any help on either of these two isses

1) group based logon.bat files
2) How to have apps follow a roaming profile.

Ok i was wrong the logon.bat file doesn't run on the client XP machines,

who should the owner of the netlogon direcotoy be?
What should the permissions be?

its root:root right now

And the fun just keeps on rolling, my problem with my login files was resolved by creating all the login files on XP Notepad, and now the netlogin works, each group has thier own login, by using %G.bat and not %g.bat as the login script = %G.bat

I still have queries about roaming profiles and how to make sure apps which are not loaded locally work.. but i guee i will have to fix that myself as well..