How to manage hundreds of users (and customized profiles) on individual Windows 7 machines?

Have you used group policy preferences before? We use GPP and it works fantastic. We have a TON of settings that we deploy and it applies fast. The nice thing about GPP, is it can be used to set defaults (for example the default home page) and NOT reapply onces intially set. You can do things like custom reg entries, file copies, mapped drives/printers, desktop backgrounds, etc. Pretty much anything.

Secondly, login scripts compbined with GPP is another nice option. There may be more complex things you need to do (for example with us, we needed to load an office plugin in excel.) that a script is better suited for.

I would simply suggest Googleing "group policy preferences".

One more bit that i forgot about, if you want software to manage this, the solution your might be interested in is a technology called "User Virtualazation". The following two companies have a popular product.

  1. AppSence
  2. RES Software

What you really should do is deploy VDI, e.g. Citrix XenDesktop. In the typical configuration each user gets a virtual machine which is reset to a pristine state at logoff. The VM image is being streamed via "Provisioning Services" from one single master image, which is the only thing you need to touch when you want to change the user environment. As a bonus you get easy versioning and rollback because the master image is stored in multiple versions. Make a change and roll back easily if it does not work out.

Implementing VDI is not trivial, though, and needs some time, although Citrix tries to make it look simple.