Mandatory profiles are an ideal way of keeping a complete set of workstations in sync in regard of their visual appearance and settings.
One thing I was stuck at: Whenever I copied a profile and renamed the NTUSER.DAT to NTUSER.MAN the profile simply wouldn’t load the preferences from it, resulting in ugly window decorations, empty start menus etc. Why is that?
The reason lies in the permissions on HKCU. To circumvent this undesired effects you can use Computer -> Properties -> Advanced -> User Profiles -> Copy To… — and now comes the thing — before clicking OK also click the button on the bottom of the form to set permissions. I used DOMAIN\Everyone but as usual… results may vary.
This way it worked fine, though.
It’s a shame that this little click isn’t mentioned in 90% of the quick’n’dirty guides on the net, it really does make a difference.