More and more software is rolled out in the form of an ISO image. You can do two things with these: mount them in a virtual drive or burn them to (re-)writable disk. Both options were cumbersome and still are under Vista.
A lot of DVD burning packages, like the popular Nero, support both options. I have a great dislike for software like Nero. It takes longer to download than a Vista RTM and the major part of the download consist of extra crapware which usually ruins your system configuration. Besides that many a virtual drive does not support the format of the iso's distributed. MS CTP's are notorious for this. I used to be a big fan of Daemon tools, a freeware tool which have saved my day on several occasions. Now there is a DT version for Vista as well. Looks like freeware but it is spyware. Not until the setup you are informed it will also install some adware. Do you always read EULA's ? Or just click next, next, finish ? Bad, bad, bad. End of confidence, end of my recommendation for Daemon Tools.
So now I'm burning all images to disk. Using a rewritable to limit the amount of junk my office produces. A great tool is isoRecorder. It is a very nifty tool. After installing you only need to right click an iso image file to burn it to disk. Works like a charm. But to burn a disk you always have to start with an iso file. The second part of the isoRecorder package is an extra option in the folder context menu (right click) which should create an iso file out of the folder's content. Should, in my experience this part of isoRecorder always crashes. Both the Vista and the xp version, the latter with the notorious 80004005 error. I don't know why and I can't find anything on the web.
So when I want to archive things I need a simple program to create the ISO file. Finding one took some time. There are loads and loads of packages around but they are either filled with ad-ware or are limited to a maximum of 300mb while evaluating. Finally I found something nice. Finalburner looks and works just fine.
Simple and honest package and really free. The only ads are the ones for their pro packages.