Has anyone tried any of those templates from Microsoft's website? Alot
of them are pretty useful but there seems to be some major flaws with
them.

For example the Employee Activities site template provided on that site
does not allow you to control the permissions for the Workflows folder
out of the box, and thus only site administrators are able to use that
template, until you install SharePoint Designer (which we know everyone
has went out and purchased!?!).

From within SharePoint designer 2007 you can unmark to hide the
Workflows folder so you can manage permissions on it just like you
would a document library and everything is OK. Or is it? Not really...

It seems that the workflows run in the context of the currently logged
in user, which causes problems for this particular site template
because it needs to update the Activities list (to increment the
counter of people signed up for that activity), and it creates a new
item in the Sign Ups list.

You can see this is not ideal, I don't want people changing the
activities that other people have posted.

So my question is, how do you enable the functionality of running a
workflow that was created using SharePoint Designer 2007 as another
user (say for instance a site administrator of that particular site)?
Because frankly I think that 99% of the templates that use workflows
like this that microsoft has provided are probably going to run into
this same sort of issue, where you are giving users way more
permissions then you had hoped for because all of the workflows the
sites are based on need a higher level of permissions then "reader".

Any assistance on this issue would be greatly appreciated.

lastly, I opened a support case with microsoft and they basically said
they don't plan on changing any of the site templates and they know
there are "issues" with them. Not good.