Ah, reminds me of CryPerl., my first post. Heh heh. For certain application types, you may be able to use VMWare to create and distribute a virtual appliance. The freely available tools are enough to do this. For the preferably minimal OS to go into the appliance, rPath provides some nifty tools that will also allow you, reportedly, to easily dish out software updates to your clients, the way MS does, for example.