Look, I work with XP and Windows 2003 all day (I'm a Windows programmer; not much call in my industry for Mac programmers). This is nonsense. The security settings are scattered all over XP: to give one example, users in a Domain environment: if you want to add a new local user to a machine that's a member of a domain, you have to go to Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Users and Groups, but if you want to give Admin permissions to a local user, you have to go to Control Panel > Users.