A friend got me onto Autopatcher last year. Its a project that has consolidated all of the Windows updates, hotfixes, product enhancements and power tools into a single installation package. It even has support for Acrobat, Shockwave, Flash and Google toolbar. Once Autopatcher is installed you can update all of the patches on your system in one go with only a single reboot. A much better option than Windows Update for patching a fresh system (do you really want to be connecting to the Internet while your system is unpatched?)

The other nice tool is Ghost for Unix or g4u for short. G4u can be used on any OS including Windows to create an image of your system. It works by doing a dd, gzip and ftp of the entire filesystem on the fly. You boot from CD (or floppy) and as long as you have access to an FTP server you can create your image. I was able to image my 30gb laptop drive down to a 3gb file in 20 minutes. Restoring is the reverse process.