Browser home page changes when logging into Domain

[bjosephImerys]

I'm on a helpdesk and support many Windows XP users. Two in particular are having a certain problem.

If they both used a homepage of say,

http://www.yahoo.com:

When logging into the domain at work, their homepage would be changed to

http://www.google.com.

If they changed it back to Yahoo or something else during the day, then went home at night and booted up again (but didn't sign into VPN), their home page would remain unchanged. Back to work the next day, the home page changes back to Google.com. It doesn't matter what you tell the browser what its home page is - it gets changed automatically when logging into the domain. It's as if the login to the domain process itself is making the change, which one would think would be Group Policy. (one of the two people who have this problem is our support manager/domain administrator; he swears our Group Policy has nothing to do with this problem, and himself has no idea what's causing it)

About our Network and IT Infrastructure:
We use a very simple group policy for everyone that has no mention of internet home pages. We have a "Google Search Appliance" on our network. We authenticate to the internet through a BlueCoat Proxy system.

About the users' Workstations:
Regular HP Business Laptops with WinXP Pro/SP2

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What else besides the Group Policy could cause such a change to the browser home page? It's only happening when logged onto our corporate domain, but not elsewhere. It only happens to two out of hundreds of users (that I'm aware of).

It's not a big deal, but rather an annoyance that I've been trying to solve for months now. I'm hoping this post will shed some light on the strange problem.

 

[smah]

If it's absolutely not group policy, you'll have to carefully analyze any logon scripts being processed. Look for anything that might be applying google.com to the registry key value HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main.

An alternative possibility is something connected with this google search appliance or the Bluecoat proxy. - that it (or something related to it) is modifying the IE related registry values. I don't have either one, so this is only a guess. However, I have used the bluecoat K9 webfilter for personal use, and as I recall there was some option in the admin area of that to set the home page for users (which I assume will set the registry key value above).

 

[jdemmi]

Couldn't it also be the user's XP profile?

What if, when they are in the office they're logging into the domain and when they go home they're selecting to "local PC/this computer" option?

-- Jason
"It's Just Ones and Zeros

 

[bjosephImerys]

Thanks for the suggestions so far from everyone. I'll try them and post back the results when I am able to.

jdemmi:

Our users cannot log into their machines locally, as they don't know the local Admin passwords to do so. So, they are always choosing to log into the Domain when logging in.

Any other suggestions?