We would like to provide access to BioNumerics over the network. For this purpose, we would like to put the home directory onto a network drive. It is easy enough to set this directory in the user interface, but we would like to set up all boxes in question automatically to keep user interaction as low as possible. Thus I would like to know what I would have to do to set the home directory in a kind of configuration file. I know that there are Homedir/*.dbs files where I can set the path to the database but I would like to set "Homedir" itself.
You have correctly assessed the possibilities with the .dbs files and the Homedir. Actually, the home directory is written in the system's Registry, under "Current user", not under "Local machine". This means that different users, if they log in, can have different home directories. Obviously, we have done this on purpose, to create maximum flexibility with the existing user possibilities of Windows.
So there is no way to automate this part of the setup; if different users exist on the machine, their home directories will have to be set up manually, one by one.