For some inexplicable reason, it recently came to knowledge that my computer liked to turn off the monitor after 20 minutes, then not turn back on. Since I couldn't figure out why this was happening, I decided that the only course of action was to disable monitor turning off altogether. Thanks to the wonders of Microsoft's XP Professional's user management features, the only effective way to change the power settings for all users, including those who do not have the permisisons to set such changes themselves, is to use the registry.
The settings for individual users are held in HKEY_USERS. The power settings for each user is held in
HKEY_USERS/(usercode)/Control Panel/PowerCfg
In this registry folder for each user, the key named 'CurrentPowerPolicy' stores the number value of the power scheme the user is set on. I like to use 3, which is labelled as "always on". The folder under this one, "PowerPolicies", stores different folders for each of these.
The trick here is to change the settings for your account to the way you want it, then find the binary value "Policies", which is inside the folder with the number of the policy the user is on. Copy the entire value of that binary value, then paste it into the same registry key for all the other user accounts, including .DEFAULT so all new users will inherit the settings.
Now all the users on my computer have the power settings I hath dictated for them.