John,
Sure. If the reading of the file is the first thing done in your program, then this will be an easy task. That is how LabVIEW loads. It stores a bunch of options in the LabVIEW.ini file. When LabVIEW first launches, it parses this file ans starts LabVIEW with the correct options. You would be doing something very similar.
Also, the way you are aproaching this is exactly what you would need to do if you build your VI into an executable. See
this as an example.
Randy Hsokin
Applications Engineer
National Instruments
http://www.ni.com/ask