heyy, Les! that mismanaged environment would be General Electric. perhaps you could do a better job with hundreds of thousands of users working in hundreds of semi-autonomous environments. anyway, it's getting managed now. true, there are other ways to handle this sort of issue in Group Policy, but i was told to do it this way. if it doesn't work, we'll try something different. people are always more willing to argue with somone else's boss, or, for that matter, with someone else's technology.

thank you for all your help, gentlemen. i have a test solution ready that will log errors - i don't think, given the realatively low incidence of the issue, concurrent writes to error log will prove to be a problem, but i do appreciate the heads up, Allen. just waiting for approval to run it. if i should find anything of possible interest to you, i'll be sure to post it. please consider this question answered.