I've also mentioned in various posts that I make heavy use of virtualization in the "Jameson Datacenter" (a.k.a. my home lab) and that I prefer to keep my VHDs reasonably small. This is especially valuable when, for example, I need to copy a VM from one of my home servers and take it "on the road" with me to a customer site.
As such, one of the first things that I typically do when building out a new VM is to run the following from a command prompt:
reg add HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer /v MaxPatchCacheSize /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
Then I move on to installing products based on the intended purpose of the VM.
Read more: Random Musings of Jeremy Jameson