New Hard Drive: How To Minimize The Pain...?

Hi all; I'm thinking of upgrading my two small (40Gb and 80Gb) HDDs into one bigger one (250Gb)... I'm going to be ok with the physical swapping, I was just wondering if anyone has any advice for how to minimize the time taken consolidating all the software; In particular...

* I've not done a clean WinXP install for over a year, and it's getting a bit sluggish. So I was thinking a fresh XP install onto the new drive when I have it, as well as putting it on a partition (which it currently isn't on). However a direct clone of the old C:\ drive onto the new one would save a lot of time with both all the games etc and would copy across all the codecs, drivers and everything else I'd have to then put back manually as well. XP wouldn't be partitioned then though. But is there a third path I've not thought of which would get a nice clean XP and all the fiddly bits onto the new drive?

* Windows Media Player 11: I currently have 20Gb of MP3s, and the associated Album/Art etc data, and lots of lovely playlists... but they all point to the second drive; is there a quick way to merge them over onto the new drive without having to manually search all the art back up again and rebuild the lists?

* Er... That's all I can think of right now; Have I missed anything else do you think? All tips welcome! Thanks!

 

*Bumpage*

Ok, finally got around to buying a new HDD... and the set up is this; I've got the two smaller drives on an IDE channel, and a new Western Digital 320Gb SATA drive. The MB can run all at once, as it's got two spare SATA sockets, so moving data across after won't be a problem, I just need to set the SATA to be the boot drive after removing the other two. The only thing I still need to be certain of is how to get the software across with a minimum amount of fuss... any suggestions then chaps?