Technology is oupacing MS's Licensing on so many fronts, they really need to start getting on top of things?
Just sharing the fact that as I now work for a Thin Client Vendor it is even more obvious that I have a need of being able to run Apps from a USB Stick where ever possible.
So, I recently purchased a SanDisk 4Gb Cruzer that is U3 compatible and initially this looked like a good way to go by running apps gained from http://portableapps.com/ and then starting to get a hold of all the Portable Packed Open Application equivalents - now I'll still continue this on behalf of some Customers who want to be completely legit about the Apps they load/use from their PC, or a Thin Client or our M100 Thin Laptop.
Although I have since had a rethink after someone mentioned to me that there was an Office 2007 Portable kicking around somewhere on the web - so after a quick search I found www.mininova.org as a new BitTorrent site and this provided exactly what I was after - self contained *.exec's of the Office 2007 Suite (sans Outlook) that run straight from the Stick, all managed by Thinstall.
At first I was more than a bit sceptical because most of the Apps appeared to only be 50 - 90Kb in size - surely this was not possible? Then I noticed that MSAccess.exe was in fact 518Mb, now that's more like it! And of course if you remove that from the same folder or rename the file then it breaks all the Office 2007 Apps, so the core dll's it needs are clearly residing in that file and it drags them out on demand as needed.
I know that one of my mates (with Terabytes of Storage) has been looking for a simple solution to this for some time - where he can simply rebuild the Device/PC and then simply add the shortcut to the Apps without re-installing? So this looks like the solution for him?
Now if you have a look in www.mininova.org for Thinstall you might get lucky as well? ;-)) Then you could build a very neat Portable toolkit/Desktop on a stick to take everything with you?