[CS-FSLUG] Windows XP restrictions & exploits

[N. Thompson]

Part of my history assignment this year is  major assignment that has to 
be done entirely independently of the rest of the course, that means no 
class time to work on it until the time comes around to present it. I 
wanted to have Cryptography as my topic and I have even gone to the 
trouble of spending hours and hours working on a program to demonstrate 
atbash, Caesar and password ciphers. The plan was to finish the program 
and use it as an example in the project by using one of the overhead 
projectors the school has hooked up to their computers but there is a 
serious problem; the school is running very locked down versions of 
Windows XP, the only programs that are able to run are Internet 
Explorer, Microsoft Word and Visual Studio 2003, I tried using Visual 
Studio 2003 to write a launcher for my program but it wouldn't even run 
the program I wrote with it because of the way the permissions are set 
up on all the school computers. I am now looking for alternative methods 
of being able to start the program in the school computers, I've 
considered burning the program onto a CD-RW for the demonstration and 
counting on the autorun feature to load the program but I was told that 
was disabled on the school computers. I then considered the option of 
writing a launcher with Visual Studio .net 2003 but the school has 
disabled the ability to run anything with a exe file extension outside 
of the read only folders C:\Windows\ and C:\Program Files\ . Finally I 
considered bringing in a Linux live CD distribution and running that on 
the computers just for the demonstration but I'm not holding my breath 
on that one, I don't think there's the slightest chance that I'll get 
permission for that since the school's sysadmin is hard to find and as a 
policy the school doesn't normally want the students to be able to do 
more then research, edit word files and write programs as part of the 
computer science course.

Having considered every option I can think of I'm more or less out of 
ideas, a lot of kids bring laptops to school for this kind of thing but 
that isn't an option for me since I don't have one; the other 
alternative is trying to find another method of running an executable 
file, perhaps through a Windows XP exploit. I would very much appreciate 
any possible input on this, I've spend hours on this history assignment 
and I'd rather not have to change the subject of the assignment and 
start all over again.

BTW. I have to know by Friday whether it will be possible for me to run 
my program on the school computers if anyone has something to suggest.