Preventing applications from performing run once tasks for multiple users

Question

In our environment we have several applications that are installed that have a need to run a little prompt the first time they run eg Media player, Google earth etc. The problem is we have many users on many different computers. And the computers have deepfreeze running on them which removes the users profile once the computer is restarted. So next time that user logs in they have to go through the whole thing of run once again. I have managed to prevent IE runonce using group policy and office run once from using the office customisation tool. Is there a way to make this happen for other applications. On windows xp we used to copy a user that has run all the apps and place their default profile into the default profile so that new users get that profile template. Now with windows 7 the process of copy profiles is not as easy. Is there an easy way to copy profiles in win 7 or is there a better way (eg modify reg or app data) to prevent apps from performing an initial run.

Thanks

Answer 1

Do some discovery to work out where each app is storing the settings that the user inputs on those 'first run' dialogs. I'm guessing most of them will be in the registry or INI files.

Then pre-populate those reg keys and config files. If you can't do it by pre-baking the profile, try via a login script.