More than likely - any answer you get will refer to one or more of the
following sites/solutions.

I have used everyone of them.  Depends where i am and what I have avalable
(as well as many other factors) as to which works best.

I have found that an unattended installation gives the most flexibility and
can be used in conjuction with imaging/RIS solutions to make the intial
installs and update them as time passes.

By CD/DVD...
http://unattended.msfn.org/

By network...
http://unattended.sourceforge.net/

http://www.leinss.com/uniimg.html
(See the WinXP Blog addition - imaging with universal image)

http://www.gc.peachnet.edu/www/wbeck/W2KXP.htm#Master
(More on building and ghosting a master image)

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/desktopdeployment/depprocess/depprocessris.mspx
(Deployment Process)

That all depends on what you want for software.

We have 16 W98 motherboards and 9 WXP motherboards in distribution.  The W98
images at least are now frozen for development.

I build our images up in three stages.

Windows XP.sp2, patched and with full driver support.

A `BASE' image with all necessary minimum OS configurations, added OS
software not included in the normal install, local gp, antivirus, about 80
printer drivers, ms windows installer cleanup utility, sysprepped and ready
for generic use.  This base image is identical in all security and features
as the final fully loaded image except that it has no software loaded
outside the OS, A/V and MSWICU.  We also use centralized storage for user
files.  Mandatory profiles. yadda yadda yadda.

The next image contains all common mandatory software preloaded in specific
order.  About 150 pieces.

Just-In-Time, On-Demand, site specific and task specific SW that can be, is
deployed by GPO, otherwise it is added manually onsite by a technician.

We are in the process of converting as many of our installs as possible to
msi/mst packages that can be deployed by GPO, but that will be a slow
process.

Even though we have Gb fibre to each site, with 16 member servers as msi
deployment repositories, given the size and number of deploys that are
potentially possible to 80 sites and about 5000 XP clients, we will still
create the common approved image with as much software as possible
preloaded, we will probably use the msi/mst to expedite creation of any new
images in the labs before that new image is approved.  These final images
are remastered annually.  The latest contained 45-60 new programs per
motherboard... depending on the age of the migrated image.

We have 1400+ workstations with 25+ different hardware runnning both
W2K and XP.
The build based on Network Unattended install and auto-reboot&autologon
(6 times)
to launch the custom Applications install and settings.
 We use bat files for pre-install and vbs for post-install.
 Technician time to launch each fully-unattended build is less than 5
minutes.
 When finished, the machine only needs USMT and be ready for end user
to logon.
 We were using the multi-function boot CD to autodetect the NIC and
connect to the network to run the initial build menu.
 The work in progress is to replace the CD with RIS based build.