Okay, just for the hell of it, I have been playing with "portable apps". That is, programs installed on and run from USB flash drives. I found versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, and KeePass( a password saver) that are configured for use on flash drives. They don't use the registry (may it and its developers rot in hell) and they don't write any files to the system drive.
Installation is very simple; just unzip a file to the flash drive and copy over your data files. For those of us accustomed to the hassles that Windows program installations can sometimes (unnecessarily) be, this is a big deal. You can then use the programs on any computer that supports the OS for which they were intended. Firefox even has a 32-bit and 64-bit version which is automatically selected for your hardware and native OS.
All the programs are working just fine (so far).
I have no idea what I will ever use them for - if anything - but it's fun to see what people are developing to take advantage of the emerging technology (the Firefox and Thunderbird versions were not released by Mozilla, but by a third party developer). Just a few years ago, none of this would have been possible, or at least worthwhile, because the high-capacity, high-speed flash drives weren't available.
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