I have, on occasion, wanted to write almost exactly this script - but the thing that stopped me was that VirtualPC apparently emulates a slightly different IDE

I have, on occasion, wanted to write almost exactly this script - but the thing that stopped me was that VirtualPC apparently emulates a slightly different IDE controller than VirtualBox, and so when Windows XP starts up in the new VM, it doesn't have a driver installed for the IDE controller, can't find its own hard-drive, and blue-screens. It's possible to edit the registry to install the required driver, but that requires booting into Windows... a Catch-22 if ever there was one. I was eager to see how the problem had been solved... but apparently Windows Vista and Windows 7 don't have that particular problem, and the IE6 VM (with Windows XP) just says "IE6 support is currently disabled". That's kind of sad; at least for the light web-development I've done, IE7 and IE8 aren't nearly as fussy and hair-pulling as IE6.