wow lots of nice ideas. will have to check some of them out.
one that i use for mounting iso is magicdisc
http://magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-overview.htmalso install some or all of sysinternals and adinfo
the creator of adinfo has lots of cool tools to play with, some free and some $
http://www.cjwdev.co.uk/Software.html