LinuxQuestions.org - Advice on multiple user management

Having got Fedora core 4 and Samba 3.0 running as a Primary Domain Controller (PDC) for 10 PC's in a Lab environment, I can achive partial of what i want, i would like some advice on what is possibly the best way to achive the following:

I have 150 Students aged 5 to 16 so i'm dealing with everything from a lack of Mmouse control to download machines... All while they should be studying. I would like each student to log into the XP workstation. Which they can now do a the PDC is communicating.

When they login i would like them to download a profile which assigns a specific set of icons to thier desktop, and this can be done on a linux group basis..

EXAMPLE

Year one student has Tux Paint and Tux type icons on thier desktop, while a year 8 student has NVu and Open Office Icons...

I would like to map thier drives so they have 3 mapped drives

EXAMPLE

s: = Personal Drive
t: = Year Group
u: = Global Data files

I think i could do this using the net use command from the logon.bat in the netlogon folder on the linux pc?

Every user would have thier drives in XP mapped like this, how would i map the specific user drives and group drives, i think i need to use %u and %g maybe..

i have a series of Registry hacks which would need to be installed on XP and only affect that user

EXAMPLE

A year 1 student cannot change thier backdrop but a year 4 student can..

Again i guess i can do this by maybe assigning each user with thier own logon.bat and in the smb.conf put the logon script = %u/logon.bat

Now the reason for my question...

i'm reading about LDAP, and i know i'm able to link this to moodle, which i use as an e:Learning system for the students... But it looks like a nightmare to setup, is it, and is there an idiots guide for OpenLadp and Samba out there, and is this the right direction to go? We also use Xoops as a Lab Intranet...

I knwo there are a few XP qustions here, and I am going to try all of these things over the next week, but rather than reinvent the wheel if anyone has any experience in any of these things, i would REALLY appreciate this....