New Filemon / regmon from Microsoft

Here's the new updated filemon and regmon. It's called process monitor.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/processesandthreads/processmonitor.mspx

Dell / Altiris Dell Client Manager

http://www.altiris.com/Products/DellClientManager.aspx

In theory, it will allow you to push BIOS updates remotely, do some other BIOS configs without touching the machines. I haven't looked into to the details.

How to bulid Active Setup keys into an MSI

http://www.myitforum.com/articles/6/view.asp?id=9457

The article's about SMS packaging, but it touches on the details of the Active Setup key that's new to XP to use to generate current user settings when the user logs on.
You would actually need an MSI packaging tool (Wise installer, Installshield Admin Studio, or even MS's Orca (free) maybe ) to create the necessary "components" to trigger the Active Setup piece of windows XP

(built in) Command Line tools

http://mcpmag.com/columns/article.asp?editorialsid=1511

here's a nice listing of some command line tools.

The "TREE" utility would be very useful for generating a text documentation of directories and subdirectories on an image. (Or on a server's applications drive, etc)

Windows Media Player - Enterprise Deployment Pack

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/enterprise/deploypack.aspx

This is a cool tool. Useful on Windows XP especially, to allow us to preconfigure all the settings in Windows Media Player, including a "corporate skin" which is really cool and removes a lot of the store, radio station and other buttons we don't really want users clicking on.

It builds the configured installer into an MSI that can be run by restricted users.
This also helped us on XP where it's more difficult to set some of these preferences in a default user registry because they get over written by XP's "Active Setup"

a guy is building an Acrobat 7 GPO template

Beta testers wanted:
http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/dthomson/archive/2006/11/11/updating-my-acrobat-reader-gpo-template.aspx

Welcome

Alright, I decided rather than spamming all the articles about image building , software configuration and repackaging, I would assemble them in a blog, where I can find them all later.

So welcome.