I do this with my own system and i thought i should just share it with everyone. Partion your hard drive into either 2 or 3 partions, on C ONLY HAVE WINDOWS and on D (and E) keep all of your backup progam install files, and install all of your things to these drives or drive. This way if anyhting bad happens to windows you can just reformat C and then reinstall all of your files from your backups. I only have a 30 gig drive and can do this fine. 3 for C and 12 for the other 2.
Matt
Matt