We currently use Altiris Management Suite by Symantec.
http://www.symantec.com/business/client-management-suite
Can pull almost anything from your clients, push software, and update license counts as well.
I haven't personally used VMware's Player but from my experience with other VMware products (Workstation, ThinApp, etc.) their software is *very* good at what it does. I currently have 4 different OS's virtualized on my work PC (XP, Win7x64, Win7x86, and Ubuntu) using VMware Workstation and it...
At my company we include the following on our base image:
SP3 + All Updates
Adobe Reader
Adobe Flash
MS Office 2003
Citrix Client
Oracle Client
bginfo (Sysinternals)
Various tweaks
Antivirus is not included on the image because we use a managed version of Symantec Endpoint Protection and the...