We need to create a default profile for users so we don't have to add software licenses and so forth every time we have someone new start work.

Default profile
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Add all apps and launch each one of them as an admin user. If you don't you can have problems launching them as a standard user.
Create a user called "default" - do not set a password.
Log in as "default"
Launch all apps and configure them appropriately. Clear the cache, history & cookies in each browser.
Clear the "default" user's caches. Go to /Users/default/Library/Caches & delete all the files in this folder.
When the set up looks good open the "Keychain Access" utility. Select "Login" from the "Keychains" area then select the "File" menu and chose "Delete Keychain login".
Log out and back in as an admin.

Note that the following *only* applies to the English profile. I assume you have similar work to do for each profile you work on.
To set our new profile as the default, open a terminal and
Become root: sudo su
Head over to the profiles directory: cd /System/Library/User\ Template/
Back up the default profile: tar czvf stock_profile.tar.gz /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj/
Delete the default profile directory contents: rm -rf /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj/*
Copy your fresh profile over: cp -R /Users/default/* /System/Library/User\ Template/English.lproj/
NOTE: make sure that this copies over any hidden directories and files
This process *will* cause permissions on the default profile to be hosed, so restart the machine and run "Repair Disk Permissions" from the "Disk Utility" app

oXygen XML editor
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Set oXygen vmoptions to be a bit more useful - you may need to change the -Xmx2048m to something lower if you don't have enough RAM. Run this sed one-liner to make the changes inline:
sudo sed -i 's/-Xss650K -Xms128m -Xmx512m -XX:SoftRefLRUPolicyMSPerMB=10 -XX:MaxPermSize=256m/-Xss64m -Xms128m -Xmx2048m -XX:SoftRefLRUPolicyMSPerMB=10 -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:+UseParallelGC/g' /Applications/oxygen/Oxygen.app/Contents/Info.plist

Corporate bling/optimizing
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Default login screen wallpaper is here: /System/Library/CoreServices/DefaultDesktop.jpg - replace it with a branded UVic jpg

Turn off Dashboard, it's a waste of RAM: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES