The boot.bin file contains what you need to make the CD bootable. Now, you can extract that portion from your Win2k CD yourself, but it requires a lot of extra work. Plus, if you had a warez version you probably only have what\'s in the i386 directory so the boot.bin file would be of no use (there\'s other files it needs, but these are regular files on the CD so you don\'t have to worry about them).
The reason CDRWIN is the magic program here is because it allows you to make a bootable CD without emulation. The others assume you either have a floppy disk, or an image of one, that you need to use to make the CD bootable. When the CD boots, it reads the image file and treats it like the A: drive (just boot from a regular CD, change to the A: drive and view the list of files there). However on a Win2k CD it doesn\'t use this emulation. CDRWIN is the only program (right now) that lets you get around that.
Yes it\'d be nice if you could edit an ISO. But you can\'t because it\'s a read-only format. Meaning, you can\'t go around and edit it (I\'ve tried, trust me). Now, you can extract files manually from an iso image using WinImage. But it will not allow any editing.