Found out today that a guy named Bart has created a free version of the Windows Preinstalled Environment and made it available for free at his website. So if you have a valid windows xp/2003 license you should head over there now and grab a copy.
This CD will give you a complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800×600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support. Very handy for burn-in testing systems with no OS, rescuing files to a network share, virus scan and so on.
The CD does have some major licensing issues: You can’t legally create more than one copy unless you have more than one Windows license. on the other hand there are plenty of Linux Live CD distributions available which don’t have any such restrictions so I would suggest that you check them out.
Will post links for them a little later today.
– Suramya