Why would you want to disable the Public view? It's one of the features of the Portal. Secondly, each user is the administrator of their My Site so they have full control of it.

This goes back to the old addage of trust and corporate policies. Management strives to manage people through "technology" rather than "people managing people". And no matter what pieces of sharepoint  you technically "disable", there are still so many other methods for the user to accomplish the same thing which nullifies the "control" goal.

Public mysite is invaluable to organizations wishing to fully collaborate and aggregate information. Our users put their skills in their profile which enables other users to use portal  serach to find people with certain skills or knowledge areas. We also store manager reports, phone extensions, shipping addresses, and other valuable information here as well.

The great thing about sharepoint is that it creates a "social-like" community that promotes users to share ideas and to locate information "more quickly". Without portal technology like this, this would be near impossible to accomplish. Of course you will have a few "bad egg" users who will push the limit, but it is no different than any other technology in this respect. As Spock said best, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"

My new buzzphrase is that "People are the key to business value".. I believe this in everything I do. Empowering your users to "take part" in your portal via the MySite and personal page makes them feel important and helps drive adoption. Adoption, is the key to sharepoint success. If people do not use it, then it will fail and provide no value.

This is kind of similar to years back when "Internet access" was beginning to be made available to all users via their company. Of course you will have the good surfers and the bad surfers. But which provides more value to the business? Allowing people to search freely to find information on the Internet? or manually picking 10-12 sites that all employees are "allowed" to go to and thats it!

It boils down to the information security polices in your organization and management philosophies. Gone are the days of locking your users in a shell and dictating their every move.. how will people grow and participate if this is always the case?

If users are Admins to their own My Site, would there be any way to apply a standard theme or template to every My Site right across the board and prevent them from changing that?

This is for a goverment organization, and they're extremely fussy about "standardization" --- and yes, control. Again, I agree with all the posts that users should be free to customize as they please (within the acceptable use guidelines), but I know I will be asked about this in my meeting tomorrow...... <sigh>

To the best of my knowledge the answers are all "yes" in regards to the private view. You can template a canned "MySite - Private view" for your users and lock them down via permissions to what and what not they can do with it.

As far as the "MySite - Public view" I think that this is pretty much locked in stone and difficult to change. Without major customizations to the product, it is difficult to control the "layout" and webparts on this one. Notice there is no "Design this page" or anything for the "Public MySite"..

But I believe that a "canned MySite template" would have to be created "BEFORE" the user makes their mysite. So if the users already have their MySites created in the environment you cannot create a template and apply it to these existing sites.

What you may have to do is delete all the mysites, then implement your template, and then turn back on the mysite and let users generate the pages again thistime using the temaplte.

If you want to keep users from applying themes altogether, you can edit this file \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server  extensions\60\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\SPTHEMES.XML and remove all the <Templates> except "none".
This will remove all the theme options for all users.

Make a copy of this file first just in case you need to revert at a later date.

To disable public view modify Public.aspx file, may be redirect back to default.aspx.