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The behavior of the clients fall into two categories: user policy settings, and computer policy settings.
User policy settings specify behavior for interactively logged-on users and can potentially affect different users who are logged on to the same computer. There are also settings that affect that user no matter what computer the user logs on to. Such settings include the desktop background image for a user or the user's default location for saving documents.
Computer policy settings are either behaviors that can affect the computer (even when no users are logged on to the computer) or settings that globally affect every user who is logged on to the computer. Examples of such settings include a setting that enables a computer to host a web server, that schedules automated disk backups of the computer, or that specifies a standard web home page for all users of the computer.
The Group Policy: Core Protocol does not define any policy settings itself. A vendor defines settings by implementing a Group Policy extension or by using data-driven Group Policy extensions (such as the Group Policy: Registry Extension Encoding, as specified in [MS-GPREG]) that allow for the definition of new settings.
An overview of when user and computer policies are applied to a client is described in [MS-GPOD] section 2.5.2.