I am responsible for the image in my company. I have a script which create shortcuts based on some selections the user makes. (OU Placement, etc).

How does your company handle shortcuts for webapps? do you give all users all apps, or just specific users get specfic shortcuts?

different OU or different groups get different shortcuts.

Where I work now they don't use that kind of thing but at previous companies we didn't use just one image. There was a base image that everyone had (XP) but all the apps that user was supposed to use differed based on the department they worked in or their specific needs. Of course they used Altiris for pushing those special apps out that everyone didn't get. On the base image I think there was only shortcuts for My Computer and My Documents and the Recycle Bin. They also had roaming profiles set up so if one guy used another computer that day and it didn't have his apps, he would either have to use another computer or use Citrix to view a virtual desktop.

So that's some kind of 'bulk app deployment' system? Like addons for nLite? I'd like to know more to see if I can find a GPL/freeware version.

Altiris is one of several desktop management suites out there. Also is SMS, LanDesk (which we use).
What you are referring to is called provisioning.

We do manual provisioning, as we only recently started doing a standard image.
We are working our way up to provisioning though.