Software Deployment

I have a bunch of files that need to be copied to a variety of different folders on the C: drive of hundreds of PC’s. The group of files is quite large (3GB) and I’m wondering if there is a way to compress them into an archive like a .zip or something else that would bring the size down a bit. For future machines, these files are just going to go on to the image but I need to get the files out to existing machines using SCCM. It must run completely silent so unless there are some switches I don’t know about, that takes .zip’s out of the equation. What do you all use in situations like this when you need to get a bunch of files copied down to machines? Obviously SCCM works great for delivering the files but I am looking for an application to package/compress the files. I had been using Altiris RapidInstall which allows me to build the structure of all of the files/folders into an .exe and when run it’ll place all files locally in the correct locations but as far as I know, that doesn’t compress them so the resulting .exe is over 3GB. Is there a way to create a self-extracting .exe through Winzip or other utility that can be run silently and can preserve the folder structure of the files within? Does anyone have an alternative to using Altiris RapidInstall? Honestly, RIPs worked great other than the fact that they don't compress and they don't work well on Windows 7. I guess I could package everything into an MSI using Wise but wondering if there are other options that you can recommend? Thanks!