Installing Acad 2005 - user rights

Apologies if this topic has already been dealt with - I couldn't find anything dealing with the specific issues, and would appreciate any comments ...

We've just started to install a mix of local and network based ACAD 2005/Revit. On the network, we've created a share that contains all the common files that we want all users to be able to access, and created an arg file that locates those files. We amended the desktop icon to include a switch to look up the config file on a local disc.

The arg file and desktop icon have removed all references to files located in the user profile, and given them fixed locations.

On installing the software on any machine, it copies a range of files to C:\Documents& Settings\etc... and when any new user logs on, it creates the same paths in their profile. It also recreates the desktop icon and removes the switches, although that icon is in the ..\All Users\Desktop folder.

For various reasons, we don't want to give our users Admin rights, so in order to let them use the software, it seems that we have to give them admin rights, let them use the software once, change the settings of the desktop icon, and then remove the admin rights, which doesn't seem wildly efficient.

Key questions then, are:

1. Is there any way to locate all the settings out of the user profiles ?
2. Is it possible to lock the desktop icon so that successive new users don't overwrite it?

Grateful for any help anyone may have.

Rob

 

See if this helps.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/item?siteID=123112&id=4494045&linkID=2475507

http://tinyurl.com/53yxf

Basically in the .ARG file:

ORIGINAL TEXT: "ACAD"="C:\Documents and Settings\<user
name>\Application Data\..."

CORRECTED TEXT: "ACAD"="%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\..."

Allen

 

If you don't want users to be in the Administrators group, you can put them in the Power Users group instead. This will allow users to still be able to access everything they need in AutoCAD and other programs, but still be restricted from making major global changes to the Operating System.