Active Directory Problems

I'm gonna try and keep this brief.  I have two key problems that are keeping my network down.

I manage a small 10 machine lan used exclusively for educational purposes.  I was forced to recreate our system due to unforseen problems and lack of a good back-up (thank you previous network admin.).  I believed I had everything just as it was before but now i'm faced with a couple of complications.  I'm quite new to this whole network admin thing so forgive any improper terminology that I may use.  

I have active directory all set up, i have my policies in the proper places and i have the policies configured just as they were before our network went down.  I understand that without knowing my exact configuration it will be hard to advise me on a solution but hopefully you can help.  When i add a user to one of the groups i have created and attempt to logon to the account on a client, it feeds me some line about "local policies don't allow me to logon interactively"  any ideas? cause i sure dont have any.

Problem number two occurs when i assign my users a profile (i'm using roaming mandatory profiles).  When i enter the proper path to the profile, it uses the profile specified but negates the policies i have in place... Any ideas? i'm hurtin here..

Thanks in advance to whomever can offer a solution.