Ghost is fine if you can afford to Ghost gigabytes of data!
(and then store them on disc.....)
System restore points would be a boon but I've had some extremely bad experiences recently when undoing a system restore and trying to reapply it so I'm struggling to really trust it when I don't have a full backup available.
The PE disc problem is going to be difficult. The Win XP SP1/SP2 builds I have available are with different motherboards and so different hardware drivers. I'll read the build instructions and see where to go from there.