Arlen,

1. Data I care about goes "where it belongs" (easily saved).
2. Program installers I care about go "where they belong" (easily saved).

You're customary vague, meaning that noone can disagree with you there.
Ofcourse, your vagueness robs you of the possibility of being warned of a
possible mistake in your choosing of "where it belongs" ...

Notice that the data and programs are essentially trivial to back up and
restore;

Great, another person who doesn't realise that dropping a rather important
part of a description makes it sound like something quite different, and
also doesn't seem to notice that that quite different thing /also/ exists in
the same context. Which ofcourse results in confusion.

Yes, Windows /installers/ are easy to save. Windows /programs/ however, not
so much (understatement).

Hence, to restore a system after backing up the two folders:
o C:\{data,software}

Goes sort of something like this when you restore a system:
a. Create the {app,data,software,menu} hierarchy, e.g., mkdir
c:\app\{archiver,browser,cleaner,etc.}
mkdir c:\data\software\{archiver,browser,cleaner,etc.}
mkdir c:\data\menu\{archiver,browser,cleaner,etc.}

Lol. You (re-)created the "data" folder, but forgot the "software" one.
Than again, you're introducing a folder, "app", which you haven't mentioned
before.

Also, what you seem to be doing there is not restoring a system from backup,
but re-creating it from backupped material. A quite different beast.
Yours takes more work, and is far more complex and time-consuming.

b. Install your desired programs, one by one.
(Each program has its own custom readme log for its setup particulars.)

I hope you also have a document saved which describes in which order you
installed all of it. Changing that order might cause one-or-the-other
program to malfunction (crash).

My point is that most of the work is in the tweaking of Windows, IMHO...

And you do that after each (re-)install ? Really ?

A widely known and accepted rule: If you know you will repeat stuff than
automate it. Doing handwork just begs for entry errors and/or skipping
steps.

Another widely known and accepted rule: Keep the data and the OS (and
installed programs) apart. And no, not just in two folders, but (at least)
on different partitions. That way you can actually backup the OS and all
its programs in one go, and *restore* it as easily (and fast) - /including/
all the settings and applied tweaks.

Still a good idea to keep all the installers though - including the one for
the OS itself.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

P.s.
Setting up a "follow-up" newsgroup robs the people of the, in this case just
one, excluded newsgroup to read about what advice fellow newsgroupers have
posted in their newgroup. Rude. Very rude even.

Than again, you show time-and-again that you absolutily do not care about
sharing your "potluck" results with the very people who made that potluck
possible, so I should not be amazed about it.