AutoCAD Visual LISP / AutoLISP :: Deployment Of Registry-Saved System Variables

My company is in the process of upgrading to AutoCAD 2013 (yes, I know 2014 is out, but IT won’t let us get the most recent because of fear of “new release bugs”). My company is small and our CAD Standards/Management is less than desirable. Over the past few years I have become the unofficial company CAD Manager and have slowly been getting us up to speed with using the latest capabilities and following best practices.

An issue that I deal with constantly is a new user not having the correct registry-saved system variables set up. This also happens a lot because our IT guy frequently reinstalls AutoCAD to fix issues. Every time AutoCAD is installed/reinstalled, all the registry-saved system variables are set to their default values. We have several that need to be set a certain way to match our current drafting standards (a few examples: .bak files turned off, plot.log files turned off, advanced attribute editor turned on, plot area relative to edge of paper, etc, etc.). Typically, I will get complaints from users about something not working correctly, and then I will troubleshoot the issue and eventually find out that they just had their AutoCAD reinstalled and their system variables are not set how they should be. Then I will get out my list and have them set all the variable s properly via the AutoCAD command line.

 I have read up on creating AutoCAD Deployments (and we will be using these Deployments for this upgrade), but there does not seem to be a way to set variables when creating the Deployment.

Finally, to complicate things a little more, most of our users actually use AutoCAD LT (so no Lisp), and only a select few (like me) have full AutoCAD. So, we will be creating two separate Deployment files as it stands (which is not a big deal).

Some of my preferred criteria for the solution:

-Solution can be used for both AutoCAD & AutoCAD LT (I’m okay with there being two separate system variable “deployment” files since we will already have two different AutoCAD Deployments. I would just like the procedure for deploying both packages to be the same regardless of whether it’s for LT or full version).

- Solution would be able to be applied to each workstation without opening AutoCAD on each machine (and ideally, it would all happen when the AutoCAD Deployment installer was run!)

Is there any current best practices for accomplishing this? (maybe by changing the registry through batch files, VBscript files, etc? Or using AutoCAD script files – however, this requires the program to be open to run, which I was trying to avoid).