Laptop Management Tools

Greetings!

I am the technology director for a new private high school where each student has a laptop connected to our wireless campus.

As we grow (currently at 250 students… a.k.a. laptop clients), I am looking for some affordable, helpful desktop management tools for managing software patches, tracking changes (registry, etc.), application deployment, etc.

Environment is 99% Windows 2k3 servers, 1% Linux servers, and all clients are XP Professional.

Any advise would be helpful.

Regards,
Scott Sandstrom
Guerin Catholic High School