Partitioning
I once sat and waited forever while XP forced a surface scan on a mere 160 gigabytes worth of C: drive, so I think your ideas on partitioning still hold good. It also makes backing-up your freshly updated Windows installation with disk imaging software (to another partition or drive) so much quicker and easier (I have System Restore permanently disabled).
Agreed, though, that custom software installations are getting very tedious (but, yes, still worthwhile as so much of a package can be useless bloat). And it's certainly nice to know that user generated data is stored safely on another partitition (or even on a second drive) well away from Windows...mine just gets copied from there en bloc to DVD-RAM whenever I remember to do it or when paranoia strikes.
I wonder whether an Insurer would indemnify a very large online financial loss if their investigator discovered that one was using an 'illegal' copy of Windows; might they not claim contributory negligence (any excuse not to pay out)? Would a hull loss be fully indemnified if counterfeit or stolen spares were found to have been been used? Sorry, thread drift and not my area of expertise anyway.