Hello Michael,
It does help to know that we are not the only ones needing something like it! Next week I will take a look at the php page and see if we can adapt it... let's see how different Moodle 1.9 and 2.x are for this! On the other hand, I'm still hopeful that there is a more integrated improvement to do this. Maybe the solution is to be able to modify the original settings for all new blank courses to make them closer to what we want. In the end, you always have to modify them, but making the starting point closer to our standard courses will help us a lot!
Just so you know, we are running Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with Service Pack 1. Microsoft SQL Server 2008. IIS 7
Thank you!
Carlos