They only use terminal server for IE and Outlook. Presumably it is some odd attempt at centralizing security.

Hmm. Interesting way of doing this. The company might want to look into a Citrix solution, as it does a better job of making the applications seem normal to the end user. A friend showed me his companies configuration off his Mac. He opened the Citrix program, and had icons for each MS Office application and several others. Opening it ran the program in a near seamless mode.