Most companies I have worked at have had either a collection of disks or a network share with the installs of the commonly used software in them. This is to allow the IT dept and skilled users to install the software they need on their work machines very easily.

However some users would see this as an opportunity to get "free" software for their home machines.

I've seen the draconian approach of locking the machine down completely, but that does not work well (in my view - if you disagree feel free to comment on it) because

1. You add so much extra work to IT
2. Users get that big brother feeling

So how do you find a way to prevent users from taking home software but still allowing them to install what they need?

You can make the assumption that most of the users in the organisations I work in are smart enough to install software, I'm not worried about the tea lady here.