After reading this on Trustware BufferZone from a link from OSNews I was quite interested in this side of virtualisation. I have to admit I haven’t actually given this one a try but after seeing a comment on OSNews referencing this Altiris SVS Review I was really impressed by the by what this could do. I thought “this would be great for testing sites on different browsers, for installing random things to try in a safe environment before propertly installing it”. So, I gave it a shot… hmm, probably my fault but i thought I’d try and install Firefox 1.07 under it for testing purposes, well, it destroyed my real Firefox and meant I spent all evening trying to fix it 😦 I ended up reinstalling Firefox and losing all my settings which was not good. Since this initial experience I haven’t tried anything further as it scares me, let me know if you’re experiences differ.
I really ought to try BufferZone now, I guess.
OSBlues 
June 16, 2006 at 8:46 am
We’re sorry you had trouble, Adam! Doing a capture of an app installation on a machine that already has that app conventionally installed could potentially be problematic. I’m not sure what happened, but it’s not a use case we tested. This release is primarily designed for corporate use. When preparing an app for centralized distribution, the capture would normally be done on a clean repackaging machine in a lab.
I’ve seen some other blog posts where individuals have caught on that Parallels is a super cheap way to get yourself a “clean machine” for SVS repackaging. Still, as long as the app doesn’t already exist on your box, you’ll usually be ok.
For Firefox, I recommend downloading our pre-build .vsa at http://juice.altiris.com/svs, under “Sample Applications”.
Thanks for giving SVS a shot. Please do try it again; the payoffs are indeed awesome.