Software Deployment

Rather then hijacking the other thread titled "Which distribution tool would you recommend? "
I thought I'd start another.

We're looking for a solution to deploy apps to approximately 100 computers, mostly notebooks, in 2 locations. The second location has only 10 computers, but they have their own Windows file server in the same domain connected by a slowish VPN.

We want to be able to push apps that everyone needs, or push to groups, as well as allow pulls for some apps that are optional, and up to the user to pull when required. Ideally we'd like to push at login time before the user has a chance to open an app that may be being upgraded.

All of our apps are commercial shrink-wrapped apps, although some are pretty specialized accounting apps, and many need to be wrapped in custom install scripts, usually auto-it scripts that call msi installs, then push registry settings and config files after the install. Some even call a second msi to customize the app after the vendor's install is done running.

Others use the vendor's setup.exe silently with an answer file.
In extreme cases we run the vendor's setup with auto-it or winbatch batched button clicks/keypresses (yikes!)

So the distribution tool we select would need to be able to use these custom .exe scripts to do much of our deployments.
Also, these scripts MUST run as the user, not as the system account, and may need access to other network shares, though we could get around that if we had to.

SMS and Altiris seem like overkill for our needs. Plain old GPO In the other thread, Specops was mentioned. I downloaded the SMS vs Specops paper, and it sorta kinda implies that it will do what we need.

Any comments on Specops, or other suitable tools would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Steve