Systems Management

Hi. I was wondering; how do you all cope with sources when repackaging and deploying using SMS..?

I mean, a normal package/repackage would remember the source it's installed from. Sometimes though, this could get you in trouble when one of your SMS child sites has issues and needs to be reinstalled/replaced or whatever.. Usually, running a script which changes registry settings etc. would fix this. (is this good practise?) Furthermore, SMS has a way of creating folders on the "package" shares which are randomly named.. (yet, uses a certain naming convention)

My question actually is, when calling files (IE vb scripts etc) not embedded within the package, is there a way to have one single package working on all sites..? Because the sites are all named differently when usinjg child sites, an full UNC path to specific files outside of MSI's is not a usuable option. This would mean that all child sites would have another package, with other UNC paths to it's child site (source)
Is the best way to have the client pc's at a specific site equipped with some sort of INSTALL variable, so one can reference sources to specific files outside of MSI's that way? Or does SMS (2003) have another way of dealing with this. Only other way i can think of, is using the driveletter option in SMS. But this in turn could give issues when repairing an MSI, since the drivemapping isn't available at that time, only at the time of installation, right? How do you all deal with this? Thanks!