Virtualized Automaton: Reducing the size of VMs for portability: Has many tricks for reducing the footprint and the boot time of vms (and some for any windows machine).
  11:28:50 PM    

Thin client server:  If you run XP as a VM, you can use RDP into it to control from a desktop.  To convert old PCs into cheap terminals, this product from X2 seems promising.
  11:25:47 PM