I think that one of the most useful developments of the past couple of years has been bootable USB sticks. Not just "LiveUSB" sticks, from which you can actually run Linux, although those are ...
Update: Before you try all of this, you may want to try using WinToFlash, a utility designed to create a bootable Windows flash drive for Windows XP/Vista/7/Server. If this works for you, you can skip ...