Need advice with Lion permission changes

[Tiemo Hollmann TB]

Hello,

I have stored several files of my app in /library/preferences/ because they
should be accessible for all users. One file is a registration file, which
doesn't make sense in the users folder and on the other hand I have 8GB of
video files, which I obviously want to share for all users and didn't wanted
to put into the apps folder, because of my update mechanism. As we have
learned, Lion has changed the permissions and now I am in trouble, my
software can't be installed anymore on Lion.

I have read all the threads regarding the Lion changes, and what I can see
is that you can actually store your files only in the users preferences
~/library/preferences/ or within your bundle or doing some chmod thru the
backdoor. I am pretty much puzzled and helpless. My questions are:

1.       What about the apple guidelines with Joshs approach to create a
folder within /library/preferences/ and open it with chmod for all users?
Are there any other pitfalls with it? Will the user be prompted to grant it
or can this be done under the hood? Could this create any other trouble on
Lion later on?

2.       What about the /applications/ folder? Could I create a folder like
/applications/myFolder/myFiles to put my common files into that? What about
the rights and permissions on that? What about the apple guidelines on that?

3.       Another approach could be that the first user creates all files in
his ~/library/preferences/, move them with mv to the common
/library/preferences/, where the next user copies them back into his
~/library/preferences/. I can't believe that this could be wanted by apple?

4.       Is there really no common place any more in Lion where to create
and modify files for all users? How do other apps it? Am I the only one who
has common files?

5.       I don't understand the sense of /library/preferences/ (for all
users) if you can't work with it anymore, what is the sense of this folder?

Thank you for any statement, which helps me finding the straight forward
way.

Tiemo