I have some mean, lean 2003 vms and I'm slowly replacing them with 2008 vms. The one thing that's bugging me at the moment is wasted space through the use of winsxs (which, yes I'm aware I shouldn't mess around with willy-nilly).

This....irks me, considering I've lost several gigs of reasonably expensive san space per vm, which adds up.

I'm wondering if there's an approved method of handling this, while still giving windows the ability to grab any files it needs for repairing itself - say a redirected global winsxs?