If a program saves a ‘project file’ in its own proprietary format, as most editors (graphic, audio and video studios, word processing and desktop publishing programs) do, you can have your blank project file already contain whatever custom settings (fonts, margins, colors, size, length, etc) you want, ready to go.

This little feat is accomplished by starting up the program with a saved project icon, rather than the program, itself.  In the case of a graphics studio, you could have it pop open with a blank pic the same size as your screen resolution, ready to paste a screen-grabbed pic into it for cropping and saving.  With something like a word processing program, the blank page would already have your custom fonts, font size & style, margins, whatever.

Since it’s easy to forget you’re working on your master file and overwrite it by accident, the trick is to open the icon’s properties and make it ‘Read-only’.  You’ll get an error message if you try to overwrite the master file, as you should.

After you save the master in a safe place, d-r-a-g the icon over to the Start Menu (or pop-out menu bar or Quick Launch tool bar, etc), then use that in the future instead of the regular program icon.  And you could keep both icons around, one for the basic program and one with your customized settings already in place.
 

WinXP:

This is how to add customized files to the ‘New’ menu feature.  For example, you could have a customized WordPad file open up when you open a ‘New’ WordPad file from the menu.

If you haven’t already, download and install TweakUI.

Open up Wordpad (in this example) and make a blank page just the way you want it.  Size and type of fonts, margins, whatever.  Save it in a safe place as "wordpad.wri".  ".WRI" is the proper "rich text" extension for Wordpad.  ".TXT" is traditionally reserved for Notepad (which doesn’t display rich text) and ".DOC" is for word processing programs.

Run TweakUI.  Go to the ‘Templates’ area.  Click ‘Create’ and browse to your custom file.  If there’s already an entry, overwrite it.

In theory, when you use the mouse or folder option to make a ‘New" file, it should have the template’s settings.