DudeSweet

Windows, the latest cumulative update at time of capture, and a single business application/platform that most employees use and is complicated to centrally deploy and configure. In my next image, that will go away. I strongly advice against baking in any software that can't be reasonably deployed later, which is probably everything if your PCs are on-net with any kind of regularity. After imaging, I use PDQ Deploy to deploy a baseline package that installs applications, runtimes/dependencies, and makes configuration changes we want all PCs to have, followed by packages specific to their department and role. Windows updates and driver updates for a couple models are handled by a WSUS server. The less software in your image the better. Less crap breaks, poses a security risk, and the smaller your network's application footprint. Every application installed on a PC that isn't needed is a security and compatibility risk, likely will require some amount of time to later manage, and could add unnecessary network traffic.

Are you using Answer Files?

This may not be of much help, but I would also question why your image is so large. If you are baking in a bunch of software, I would suggest, in the longer term, looking into software deployment and management platforms that let you manage and install software post-imaging, ideally without requiring VPN. Of course this is only applicable if the imaged PCs are on-net and will stay that way.

If you are using PXE+WDS, the easiest (only?) solution is to create an IPSec tunnel to their network (with appropriate DHCP Options). The client can then hardwire PCs into their network and boot to PXE. If not using PXE+WDS, you should look into SmartDeploy's cloud integration.

Don't forget Platform Pack updates.