Patches on a new PC?

I bought a new PC from Dell with XP SP2 loaded. I would've liked to get Office 2003 pre-installed as well, but that's impossible since they're so deeply in bed with Microsoft. Only the latest & 'greatest' for their customers, according to my corporate salesman. Office 2007 offered only. I should feel lucky I could get XP SP2 rather than Vista!

It took me half a day & a dozen reboots just to get the PC ready to personalize. Most of the time taken by patches! Out of the box, I think there were over 80 patches just for Windows XP SP2. Then I installed Office 2003 & the number jumped to over 100. I don't find that acceptable.

I thought I recalled Microsoft saying they would have XP SP3 out about the same time as Vista? I know they changed the date now to the first half of 2008. I guess we'll have over 200 pathes by that point - if we can even get it. Maybe by that time Vista will actually fit into a corporate network.

In the meantime, I have 18 PC's to roll out as quickly as possible. Thank you, Clonezilla!