I've tried Drive Image XL. It tends to be sloooow.
I've also had problems reloading a drive image. I made a backup copy of the main partition. The image looked good, I could recover files from it. When I tried to transfer it back to the same drive it showed the image was a few sectors larger than the partition it came from. Tried enlarging the partition. Each time I made it bigger, the backup file showed it was few sectors larger and would not load.
Win XP Pro SP3 with multiple drives.
I will soon be doing an image of my system for backup purposes. I downloaded the freeware DrvImager XP, which has good reviews. I'm very impressed with the "help" in this program, it's extensive and fairly easy to understand for a non-techie. In the help section, the author says that if one doesn't have that much on their computer, (and therefore their partition) he recommends using xcopy instead, which is a feature of XP. And he explains how to do it with xcopy. I have a 40 gig HD, and only 2.5 gigs used up. My C drive is File System: NTFS
File system: NTFS
Partition size: 40,970,084,352
So, if anyone out there has done imaging on their computer, maybe you can give me some advise and/or encouragement. Now I'm not sure whether to image with xcopy or with DrvImager, or even if it really matters which one I choose. I have only one hard drive in my computer, so I can't do any partition cloning, it has to be an image. And if anyone has experience with using DrvImager XP, please share that, whatever it is good or bad. I am not a "newbie" to computers, but I'm no techie either. There's a lot I don't know and haven't done before, and doing something as serious as imaging makes me rather nervous. Thanks for any help, advise, comments or whatever.

Chowhound
Comic Vine
GameFAQs
GameSpot
Giant Bomb
TechRepublic