I have an Office 2010 customization question regarding the deployment of corporate templates.
Can the ServiceURL value for registry key HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Spotlight\Providers\MyCompany contain a file URI?
The documentation seems to insist on a network location (\\server\public\templates\Contoso\WordTemplates.xml is the example). For this to work, the XML customization file's various path-related attributes are assumed to accept a file URI too.
See Deploy custom templates in Office 2010 for more information.