Best practice for a build environment?

Any tips on good practice for a build environment??

I have just created a Visual Builder script for a system comprising
VB, VC++, Delphi components and a Installshield Developer project. We use SourceSafe for version control.

At present I am running the Visual Builder script on a development
machine. All the script does is get latest source to a clean
directory, version stamp, compile and check back in. So it assumes
that Visual Studio and Delphi etc are installed on the box.

I want to move across to a 'build' machine. Ideally I'd like the
build machine to require the absolute bare minimum of software pre-installed. Possibly just Visual Builder, and SourceSafe's command line engine (SS.EXE??). So the script would actually get the VB, VC++, Delphi etc compilers from SourceSafe as part of the build process.

Has anyone done this? Is it a sensible approach?

Have you any guidelines on what basic set of files I need to store in SourceSafe for each command line compiler?