A couple of months back, I blogged about a
driver to provide direct access to virtual floppy disks. Today, I've come across a number of sources (most notably
Thomas Lee and
Steven Bink), that pointed me in the direction of a similar tool for directly mounting ISO CD images in Windows XP - the
Microsoft Virtual CD Control Panel. Although unsupported, and not even searchable on the Microsoft download center, this tool is referenced in the
MSDN Subscriptions FAQ. There are other tools for manipulating ISO images, but what I like about this is that it simply allows me to mount an ISO as another drive in my system, in the same way that Virtual PC can capture an ISO image and use it as the CD drive.