How to make an application GPO aware?

It's not that you have to be group policy aware, it's that the group policy has to be aware of the registry keys your program uses.

The purpose of custom Group Policy Templates is to have a user-interface for managing a custom set of registry keys used by a particular program. The domain administrator sets the policy to the desired values, and the policy is pushed out to machines on the domain.

In your case, the custom policy template will define the corresponding HKLM registry keys that your program uses. You can now trust that the values stored in:

HKLM\Software\MickSoftware\My Program 2010

are what the administrator has desired be there.

Note: The following "policy" registry locations are non-persistent:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PoliciesHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\PoliciesHKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\PoliciesHKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies

"This means that when you log off the computer or when you shut down the computer, the policy settings are removed."

So it seems to me you want to store your registry values where you normally store them, e.g.:

HKLM\Software\Avatar Software Creations\HelpDesk\DatabaseServer    ServerName: REG_SZ = "lithium"    UserID: REG_SZ = "helpdesk"    Password: REG_SZ = "aSBsb3ZlIHlvdSBLaXJzdGVuIFNoZWxieSBHdXllcg=="