With windows XP it was straight forward to copy a template user profile to the system’s default user profile, however, with the advent of windows 7 that became more difficult.

For a very detailed discussion from the Microsoft Deployment team see:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/deploymentguys/archive/2009/10/29/configuring-default-user-settings-full-update-for-windows-7-and-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx

This post says that a direct copy of the user profile breaks certain things in the new, more complicated windows 7 environment. However, this article also states (and my testing proves) that the “official” method, that of using CopyProfile in sysprep, leaves several settings unmoved.

Specifically, any user customization to installed applications are not copied. For example, all our Firefox settings and bookmarks are not copied. As well as, our particular settings of Photoshop for our specialized teaching classrooms are also lost.

Microsoft’s answer to this complaint, at the present time, is to suggest using group policy to set these settings. For many applications that would be possible. But alas, it is simply not possible with most of the specialized settings for our educational software.

In my judgment, the things that get broken by the manual , unsupported copy are far less concerning to me in a classroom /lab setting. Therefore, I presently do manually copy the user profile over the Default profile following the original method described in:

http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/windows-7-copy-default-profile

I continue to hope that Microsoft hears the pleas of so many that have posted to their deployment blog to provide a complete “copy profile” option.