I've just spent maybe an hour reading through the Thinstall website about their product amazingly enough called the Thinstall Virtualization Suite (Win).

https://thinstall.com/products/virtualization_suite.php

Looks like these guys have successfully automated the whole procedure for install capture, portable app conversion and sand boxing (including virtual registry). One thing I like is the ability to roll NET framework (which must hold the world record for registry entries) into the one *.exe, along with the app. With compression I'd imagine you could cook up nice springy, small footprint stuff. I'd love see a compacted version of CS3 working this way.

Watch videos here:
http://thinstall.com/sales/demo.php

Features - and a lot of them:
https://thinstall.com/help/index.php?features.htm

Apps they have tested:
http://thinstall.com/products/vs_apps.php

Help - with outlines of the configuration options:
https://thinstall.com/help/index.php

Do take a look at the price tag. Could be OK if you have 5000 staff ... Anyone here played with this?
 

Conversions Plus (http://www.dataviz.com/products/conversionsplus/index.html)? I've no idea if it will do this, and you may have already given it a go but...

-Darwin (May 15, 2006, 11:24 AM)

I finally got to use Conversion Plus on a friend's computer. I ran a number of tests covering a range of text, spreadsheet and database docs and it seems to work smoothly and handles foreign language materials well.

Some observations on Conversions Plus:

- by default it converts everything to Times Roman (i.e. no font output option).

- it will not open folders with symbols or "non-english" characters - you'll have to rename those folders using plain text. Example: "Br>!" has to be changed to "Br". This will catch you out the first time, since there is no warning from CP that it cannot open the folder.

- double quotation marks such as [ " hello " ] will often appear as [ _ hello' ]

- text formatting is approx 90% spot on - expect at llittle editing to tidy up errant tabs, indents etc.

- you'll need to manually insert the field headings in speadsheet & database docs

- doumentation is minimal. For more detail on Mac formats you'll have to go to MacDisk. They provide detailed information on nearly any Mac format you could think of, which you'll see listed here on their site map:
http://www.macdisk.com/sitemapen.php3.

Basically DataViz Conversion Plus works - it's easy to use, handles batch processing and supports most of the commonly used MAC formats - so it gets my recommendation.

Andre