Thanks dgorsman! We've tried the standard profiles in the past, but it didn't work out too well for us, because the way we were driving the profiles were through the shortcuts, but no matter how many times we tell/ask our users to launch the program first, then open files, most of our users just double click on files in Explorer to launch the program which resulted in chaos. We abandoned the profile model and instead used the acad.lsp to drive everything, this way we know things will be configured correctly no matter how AutoCAD is launched. As far as the arx testing, this sounds like a good way to configure the Civil 3D as AutoCAD correctly, I will look into it a bit more.
Thank you.