Just a quick note about my play with template quick projects.
It is fairly easy to reference a series of read only base layers without them being copied over and over(taking ages when its 100Meg of shapefiles)
efectivly the process is:
set up your mxd in arcmap untill its all pretty
Ensure all base layers are shapefile readonly.
keep Checking out and testing in arcpad untill you are satisfied about how it looks in arcpad. be sure to use read only shapefiles for the base layers.
move the said shapefiles BaseLayers to the folder "\my documents\BaseLayers\" on your GPS
edit the project.apm file change the reference to each shapefile from "xxxx.shp" to "\my documents\BaseLayers\xxxx.shp"
rename the .apm file and accociated files to template.apm and template.log.
zip up the rermaining files and copy xxxx.zip to the "arcpad install folder\templates\" eg "\program files\arcpad\templates"
create a quick project and select the new template
