I've read posts on how to make usb flash drive installs for vista and its quite easy. My only question is that in some guides they format the drive to fat32 and otheres they use ntfs. Is there any real difference? My understanding of file systems is that ntfs is much faster, but does that affect usb windows installs? Would fat32 be better because it doesnt include the ntfs overhead (and windows automatically putting system volume info and other stupid crap on there).

Any thoughts?

NTFS will positively affect the speed of the install, but will also (eventually) run down the USB stick.

I'm wondering if anyone has done any benchmarks on the 2? if not I might do it myself and post the results.