Snow Leopard Server - Managed Dock Settings

Question

Hello Everyone,
In our environment, we are running Snow Leopard Server 10.6.7 with a mix of 10.5 and 10.6 clients. We are managing settings via Open Directory. We have a computer group policy configured to manage our dock policy settings among a few others. Within WGM, our dock policy settings are setup to be managed "once." When the policy was configured, our Mac administrator put together a customized default dock arrangement with the most commonly utilized applications included in our base image allowing our end users to start with a small clean dock arrangement and add applications/folders as desired.
Regrettably, last week I inadvertently made a change within WGM's managed dock settings in our default production policy. The following morning, several end users logged on to find that their dock customizations had been discarded and replaced with the default setup. To minimize the impacted users, I enabled "merge with user's dock" to avoid further loss of dock customizations. Looking forward, as we roll out new hardware with new images to our existing users, I would like to start with the same scaled back dock with the commonly utilized applications included in our base image. The problem with enabling "merge with user's dock" is that the default set of Mac OS X icons is included causing the dock to be cluttered.
Is there anyway to only apply managed dock preferences if there is not a local profile on the machine the user is logging into? Any other thoughts for circumnavigating the mess I created?
Thanks!

Answer 1

Enabling "merge with user's dock" created problems of its own by introducing duplicate icons for some users. In the end, I unchecked it. Unfortunately, all users are going to receive the default dock arrangement and have to re-customize their dock preferences as desired.