Okay, I've been administering Windows NT Domains for several years now. And all has gone fine so far. But now this newfangled XP gizmo comes along and screws everything up.

Here's the way it used to work:

- When someone sets up a new NT workstation, they need a computer account for the local PC to establish a trust relationship with the domain.

- This computer account can only be created by an administrator (or certain other designated users).

- There are two ways to create this computer account:

1) An administrator walks over to the user's workstation at setup time and enters the admin password to join that workstation to the domain.

2) An administrator, without leaving his chair, can run the Server Manager application and add <<computername>> to the domain, and tell the user what to name the computer. The user is warned that the computer account has to be set up by an administrator, but lets them continue. On the next reboot, the user is properly joined to the domain with the new computername and all is well. The administrator has not had to leave his desk.

My problem. Option number 2 does not exist when setting up an XP workstation. At least, when this guy in our department went to set up XP, it wouldn't let him go past the domain-joining part until it got my name/password in the box. There was no way to just tell it, "look, you stupid OS, I already added the computer account to the domain, just use it."

How the hell do they expect people in my position to deploy XP if we keep having to run to each workstation to set it up? That's just dain-bramaged. Is there an easy work-around?