push second tab via group policy

You need to use group policy preferences to specify user level registry setting. One way to do it would be to set the start pages on your machine, and then use the grroup policy preferences registry wizard to suck the settings from your registry and put them into a policy.

http://superuser.com/questions/151536/ie8-registry-location-for-multiple-home-page-tabs/151539#151539

As far as I know the only way of doing this is by using group policy prefferences. This is not too hard to accomplish if you have the client side extensions installed on your XP machines.

From a windows 7 or server 2008 machine create or edit your group policy and you will gind the settings your looking for uner. User configuration | prefferences | control panel settings | internet settings.
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This can indeed be done using GPO and the settings and screen shots can be found here.

http://www.grouppolicy.biz/tag/home-page/

Things to note though,

This will only work for clients running windows 8 or above.

Also you need to configure this from a DC running IE8 as the ADMX files will not be present otherwise, so if you do not have the option to configure the secondary homepage simply install IE8 (this had me stuck for ages a few months back) ;)

i have windows 2003 and it seems all your suggestions are valid but I don't have these options in my active directory.  Is there something I need to install in order to get these options.

You could try grabbing the required files from here.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=ab4655f2-0a3c-42eb-974d-24b2790bf592&displaylang=en

Sorry I thought that was the actual adm file, have you tried just installing IE8 on your 2003 server? that will instal the adm files too as is the case if installing it on 2008.

I will try it and get back to you.

For the solution that I mentioned with the group policy preferences you will need to create the group policy on a windows 7 or server 2008 machine.

Other than that the only thing the clients will need is the client side extensions. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943729