Copy all desktop settings for a new user

[Philipp Schulte <pschulte@uni-duisburg.de>]

Hello,
lets say I have a few users (not all of them with prior GNU/Linux
experiance) and I want to setup a common profile for their accounts.
By profile I mean things like desktop-icons, desktop-theme, menues,
MUA-settings, browser-settings, printer ...

The users will most likely either use KDE or Gnome and applications
like Firebird, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.

I would like to create a role-account, configure everything for this
account and copy all those settings everytime a new user is created.
I know about /etc/skel but I am not sure if it's possible to use this
because some paths are absolute in configuration files.

I am sure somebody must have a solution for this. Thanks for any
pointers. Regards,
Phil