[consulting] New project drupal workflow

[George]

I'm testing the idea of having a local repos of drupal and the essential 
module (and some not so essential modules) and checking out when i start 
a new drupal project, and installing. of course this has the negative 
that modules and drupal slowly fall out of date, but i find it 
incredibly quick just to checkout, and start with the all the modules, 
and take away what i don't want.

i'm thinking about combining this with an install profile to 
automatiically enable the core essential modules cck / views etc to 
remove an extra layer of module enabling!

do any of you do anything similar? or do you have a different system?