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Zero-footprint Linux distributions. [You know Linux, free Operating System (like Windows ... eh ... except not free), open source, penguin.] You can find an article about them here. I personally haven't tried it, because the one I am looking at (Knoppix) is about a 700 Mb download. My computer estimated it would take me over 48 hours to download. Darn Dialup. Anyway, it is really cool, if you have ever been interested in Linux, but was too afraid to mess with partitions, or to install it on your system, this is the route to go. Basically you burn this to a CD, insert it into your computer, restart your computer and you will have linux up and running. After you take the CD out and restart your computer, you are back at Windows. This is a great failsafe, because if Windows ever gets screwed up where you can't get to your files, use your Linux CD and print or back them up. Knoppix has about 2 Gb of highly compressed software bundled with Linux that is put on just the one single CD. There are other versions of Linux that are similiar to Knoppix, like SUSE 8.2 Live-Eval which uses a small swapfile, so you can store configuration settings, but they are stored in only one file so your Windows setup should be safe. However, it will only work with hard drives that are in the FAT format and not NTFS.

Check out this site for instructions on how to turn a floppy disk into the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek.

By the way, just to see if it is even possible with a 56 Kb connection I started downloading Knoppix, right now it has downloaded close to 7 Mb and it is still showing 0% downloaded.