I only recently heard about Puppy Linux as a tool to repair windows machines.
The one thing I had seen that impressed me with Linux as a real option was that time after time, the Webinar Demonstrators would be showing multiple iterations of Windows Clients and a server ( usually) so that the product they were showing would have a closed system that had 2 clients running from a server, or in some cases "interacting with a server" and things would usually work very well, and if a Windows client or server crashed, then it would taken almost no time to restart the client or server. I did find out that the demonstrators almost universally used VMWare's Workstation for Linux install and the common Linux base install was Ubuntu.
I have used Active disk as a solution/fixer option for windows PC, since I work in IT, and I also have to test on systems with Windows, so Windows is not a choice I can change, but the base system is something I can fix; especially after talking with techs from VMWare about the Workstation for Linux Client.
It is beginning to look like Puppy is going to be a good add in to my tool kit. I just have to make sure it is network/internet secure.
The other comment is that I find it amusing the amount of Windows commentators and techs whose primary machine is a MAC of various kinds, and now with FUSION from VMWARE they can even test windows content without leaving the more stable MAC realm.