I am currently developing a web asp.net app, as part of the app it will be required to access the Active Directory to determin the privs of a connected windows authenticated user - I have only been able to get this to work if I alter the machine.config file to have a hard coded administrator account that is allowed to access the AD.

I am sure this article goes some way to explaining that it is possible to acheive this level of access another way, however I can't make sense of it in this context.