Yeah, I have to admit that DeepFreeze rocks at it's job. Ironically, I'm posting from a computer with it running right now. My school has been using it since near the beginning of the school year, and I don't mind it, since *I* don't install games, etc.

What DOES piss me off is that DeepFreeze is protecting a ghosted setup that really isn't set up correctly. They've protected computer with programs that have been installed, but not used for the first time!! So IE asks you EVERY SINGLE SESSION (Windows login session) for 'do you want to save this to a password list?', and other inane things. And it runs a file optimizer from Office at startup, when it isn't even NEEDED!!! The program works great, if you have the protected setup working already... but otherwise it can be a real pain.

I've discussed this with some people already, and here's my theory...

Deepfreeze makes it so that windows uses a copy of the FAT, a copy made during bootup. (c:\windows\system\iosubsys\ might shed light on this... ) And basically, that second fat is the copy that the computer works with... with one change. If you delete a file, the file entry is NOT marked 'okay for rewrite' in the new virtual fat, although it IS marked with something to denote 'deleted'... Does it make sense? It needs to have some non-standard-fat way of making sure that it doesn't overwrite physical data. Perhaps it restricts any data writing to sectors that were already marked as clear on bootup.

Oh, and you *can* shut down the depfrz.exe program by killing a thread before killing the main thing, but it's just a decoy. As far as I can tell, the .exe itself is just to A) Trick you and B) Let you know Deepfreeze is running.

As for cracking it, I haven't tried to any major extent, but I would suspect possible avenues would involve either getting to it before it loads, such as a bootdisk (Bios passworded on this comp), or loading your own Ring 0 VXD or something... But I'm hardly a low-level programmer.

Taking the HD out and connecting it to a laptop Or "Ye Olde Manual Bios Resette"...

Question: Should I bother attempting this? Or do you think I would need a crash course in assembly or something? Or is it really simple but one of those things nobody thinks about?