A number of partners and customers have commented that the Deploy Applications to Production Faster blog post has helped them greatly reduce the amount of time that they spend deploying apps to production. If you deploy applications to production using the Force.com IDE, you'll want to check out that post. You'll also want to install the latest version of the Force.com IDE. This maintenance release for Spring '09 includes several fixes and is highly recommended. For more information, check out the release notes.