remote assistance

Things like Fog Creek "Copilot" gets at the problem of computers today: all too often someone has to maintain or unstuck a computer and usually someone you know remotely (by phone of course). Copilot allows control remotely but what if all the smarts were packaged in a program in a CD which can boot by itself and connect to a server? What if this software also did backups and restores to a server? And what if the data (and program) can be transparently be copied to a new machine? Or on a remote location? With virtualization technology, being able to run and restore portions of old environment would be easy to do.

[Some of the ideas above was shared to me by a coworker but I doubt if anything above is really new...]