I've done symlinking before, but since space isn't an issue for me I ended up reverting to three wholly separate wow directories before the patch hit.

Now I'm looking at a really great deal on a 32GB SSD drive...since 32GB isn't enough to store 3 full copies of WOW I'm naturally thinking I'll symlink the data folders...have 3 wow's on the drive but only one "instance" of the data folder that the other two symlink to.

So how does that work come patch day? Do I run the "host" wow, let it update, then just copy one or two other files (not in the data folder) to the slave wow folders?

Yes, I need three separate wow folders, as I run different addons, different configs, etc between clients. I know with innerspace you can virtualize the config file, but I don't wanna go Innerspace just for that - I'm happy with my HotKeyNet solution I'm currently using.