Re: "the time it takes to bloat over all the drive it was installed on"
Your VM can't grow the drive size to something adequate? Sounds like a software problem to me.
While it is true that when Bill Gates uttered the infamous phrase that disk space was free it wasn't, these days is pretty much is. Even a cheap laptop comes with a 250G hard drive these days, and even at 81G for all of my installed apps and data on my work system, that's not even 1/3 of the available disk space.
True, you'll probably have problems with .dll rot and the like, but with MS shunning service packs, these days you'll get that no matter what.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
