Maybe there's another way to do this, but I'd like to periodically be able to download windows updates to disk (not via windows update - which as far as I can tell, just installs them and then that's the last you see of them) so that I can use something like nLite to insert them into another windows cd/dvd just in case I need to do an install on a machine that can't get access to the network or if I have to install on a new server (it also helps for unattended installs). I already created a new disk with RAID drivers so that I don't have the no-diskette problem when fresh installing windows server 2k3.
Is there anywhere to just find these easily without having to scan a ridulous amount of KB articles for the ones I need?
MBSA 2.1 provides download links for each hotfix that is relevant.
Check out the Microsoft Security Bulletin Search page at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Current.aspx. It will list the Knowledge Base articles associated with each monthly security bulletin for each affected piece of software. It is still a lot of work, but it is less work than searching the Microsoft Knowledge Base for the word "update" and going from there!
Note that what I have described will only give you security updates. I am not aware of a way to find other miscellaneous updates other than to notice them in Windows Update and then go searching for them. The easy ones to search for are Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, MSXML, and the .NET Framework. Just search for these (as well as KB numbers) at http://download.microsoft.com, and you'll find a lot of what you want.
You may also want to search the web for lists. Several sites provide lists of all current updates for a number of products.