With all your input, I am back to the drawing board and will rethink our strategy.  I need to keep the content managers happy and also make the development and deployment as easy and smooth as possible.  I will report back what we decide on.

Thank you all for your help, This board rocks!

I use DNN much the same way as Tony but only after a year whilst I got an understanding of it all.

For Portals I add aliases dev1.xxx.com (and dev2.xxx.com) and in IIS have each of these go to another IP address.  Straight copy of the live/production one into this. A copy of the database (make sure it is restored onto the right database) and a copy of the full DNN folder, rememberng to change the web.config to point to the 2nd database.

What I do differently though is the updating of the live/production one. As was mentioned... a straight copy over this would wipe any changes made on the live... and since I have a membership based site (users, forums, blogs etc), or sites with e-commerce etc this can't happen.  So I just use the Dev1 for applying changes, testing them, showing clients options etc before making the changes again to the live one.

Usually quite easy that way, for the time being anyway. All the tweaking is done on Dev1 one and when at a stage that it's ok, the live/production one is updated.