We know that setting up a WordPress blog is going to take 30 minutes or more, unless you have a fancy schmancy mass installer. Not everyone wants to pay the money for such a thing and only a very few such as the WP-Installer and WP-Cloner combination from Mass-Automation work!
Unless you have such a wonderful tool I think you may be interested in a way to save a little time.

Here is what I have so far…
1) Put all the themes and Plugins you are going to use into folders with the same name as they have on your host. Instead of uploading plugins and themes one at a time, now you can keep a standard pair of folders and when you have installed WP, just FTP up the two folders and overwrite whatever is already there.

2) Use a single page to do most of the settings for your blog. For example, set names, titles, default category, numbers of posts, length of RSS feed, moderation - you name it and one hidden page has all this and more:

http://myblog.com/wp-admin/options.php?option_group_id=all&updated=true

(Be careful with this page, along with the power for good comes equal power for harm!)

3) There is a free plugin/script that activates all installed plugins at once, you can get it here: http://www.wppluginpro.com/ It’ll cost you an email address though.

The reason that you want to use this plugin is to save the time that you’d otherwise spend clicking buttons to make the plugins work. Not an issue with just two or three, but with 15 or 20 it gets a tad boring.