Problems with MS Office 97 or 2000 on a domain

I'm hoping that someone can lead me to a solution to this problem.
I am an administrator on an education domain. For security reasons ( at the
secondary and high school level) we have decided to implement windows XP
workstations on a Windows 2000 domain.
We have seversl labs with 30 to forty workstations and when a regular user
logs in, the internet, printers and MS office spell check/thesaurous have to
be set up for every user and with thousands of computers and thousands of
students logging on to any computer in any lab this has become a nightmare
to administer. Previously we used windows 98SE and once the settings were
configured, they were good for all users.
We considered roaming profiles but the printers are scattered throughout the
school and each class or lab prints to a different network printer.
We would like to configure one machine and then use Ghost to create an image
of this machine and transfer it onto the others.
Can anyone help me to find a solution to this problem?
Thanks