A few days ago I found (well, somebody found and twitted about it) Ninite. Ninite is a custom installer for open/free software (in fact it includes some demos of commercial applications, too). You access their website, you define what applications you want to install, and download an installer. This installer performs the downloads of the software you requested, and installs them in their default location.
It works very well (at least it worked very well in my test). I am just lacking some good software on the package. Some examples, are IzArc (I do not like 7-zip), Strawberry Perl (if it installs Python, why not Perl?), Avira Antivirus (I like it, works better than AVG in my latest installs). There are other applications that might get added, like MikTeX and TeXnicCenter (this would be great for my students), or Lilypond (or any other music-editing software). But I understand that keeping the list small is also a virtue…