Power Options for Limited User Change Unpredictably

Following security "best practises," I normally run my laptop from a "Limited
User" account, call it Account C. As such I've noticed that the actual "Turn
off monitor" and "System standby" timings do not always agree with those that
appear in the Control Panel/"Power Options Properties" box for that account
(which were set at a time when Account C had administrator privilages).
During XP setup, I was forced to create two other administrator accounts:
"Administrator" (the big Kahuna, call it Account A) and another administrator
account (call it Account B). Accounts A and B have been given distinct
power-options settings for convenience; those of Account B happen to be
identical to those shown under Account C. It appears that Account C
sometimes adopts the power-options settings of Account A, sometimes its own
(or those of Account B, from which it was originally "cloned"). So my
questions are the following:

1) How are the power options for a Limited User determined? Is there any
way to keep them constant or at least to see what their actual values are at
a particular time?

2) Are there other settings (besides power options) that APPEAR to have
separate values in a limited-user account but are ACTUALLY controlled
somewhere else?


Other possibly relevant information: My original XP installation was SP2 on
a Lenovo laptop from 2008. (As you may know, Lenovo pre-installs lots of
"helpful" software, including its own "Power Manager," which appear to change
the corresponding settings shown in the XP Control Panel applet. Lenovo
warns that its software is incompatible with SP3, but I've kept XP otherwise
up to date by installing all of Microsoft's other security updates.) My only
clue to what's going on comes from the Que "Special Edition Using Microsoft
Windows XP Professional" book [third edition, 2005, p.882], which says, "When
no one is logged in, Windows XP automatically uses the power saving options
set for the last user who logged in with commputer administrator privileges.
....their power options setttings are stored as the global defaults on the log
in screen..." No definitions are given for "global defaults" or "log in
screen," nor is anything said about limited users. I apologize in advance if
there is a prohibition against a question that has already been posted in
another section; I haven't received any answer there, so I'm trying again.
Any clarification would be much appreciated.