Take a look at www.ceedo.com .

It allows you to take your data and also carry your regular Windows applications with you to run on any PC even if you are a guest and not an administrator.

So it copies the user profile (i.e., your home directory) onto a key and makes it easy to copy it back. You can do this in the Advanced part of System Properties.

Or do they plan to make it simply accept any profile on a StartKey that's plugged in, and use that profile as if it was stored locally? That'd mean saves and reads would be going to the Flash instead of a locally stored profile, leaving very little behind to show you were there.

I assume this will also be fore Vista/2k3/WHS/etc.

Mm, I guess this could have application for Help Desk workers walking around helping other people's workstations.

portableapps.com While I understand that they are aiming for something different, I cannot help but to ping PortableApps. It fulfills many of those premises and then some more - and it's free.

U3? great support of security, what MS should do is finally disable autorun completely, it's 2008, instead of using it and keepings things insecure.

100 gigs of music. 90 gigs of pictures from 2000. Is that gonna be available MS?

Much ado about nothing.

Damage/Cyril, I think the title meant to read "Microsoft readies StartKey flash devices"?

(No "t" at the end of "readies".)