Firefox

will you only be deploying to the 1 machine, or are you going to try to create some custom policy to remove\rename the custom folder everywhere? not sure where the custom folder comes from, I don't have it in my environment

are you sure you were checking the user config before and not computer?

have you run RSoP with a particular user and machine that should be getting this setting? what was the result?

We had a similar sort of issue, it was to do with a setting running in preference mode. User Configuration\Windows Settings\Internet Explorer Maintenance\Connection right click this and see if preference mode is ticked? Under connection you will see the proxy settings option (check your settings are correct) The only way we got this to work was to untick preference mode, which effectively enforced the settings! this does clear other settings under Internet Explorer Maintenance though, so do try this in a test setup first ;-)

For the Internet access you could create different group policies, for those you wish to deny internet access to, simply "Misconfigure" your proxy settings and apply it to the OU in which the users you wish to deny reside. Then deny users rights to change the Lan Connections under IE It's not the cleanest way, but if you already have AD, it's free :-D

We use c:\windows\system32\shutdown.exe /f /r have no problems with it working

Sorry if I didn't spot it earlier, but how are your profiles "called" from AD? Assuming you only have 1 account per user but you wish for them to be able to use different profiles for different logins.....are you setting the AD profile path to profileshare\profilename%osver%? OSVER is what we use but you can configure what you like here. We then configure the %osver% as an environment variable apologies if I've gone off on a tangent and misread your question

I'm also having the same issue, I set the "Configure new tab default behaviour" option to Home Page. I had this set as Machine part and had the User part as "Not Configured". Like yourself this was not applying. I then set both parts to be Home Page and still having the same trouble. Running the GP result in gpmc I can see that, that particular part of the policy is being applied, but I am still left with the "New Tab" page :-(