This experiment worked, but before I start propagating the word widely to my colleagues, I want to be sure that there's not a cliff ahead. Here is the story:

We put a compiled VFP exe on a USB flash drive along with the required VFP run-time DLL's and a few other app-specific files that the app expects to see. Without actually installing any VFP anythings on the machine (which is locked down), the app seems to run fine off the flash drive, and the people who are testing this are happy because they can run the VFP program they want to run on the machines they want to use, and proceed to gather some data with it on those machines that otherwise would be much more tedious to do.

Can such a strategy be counted on as a general solution for this kind of situation (where you can't actually run an installer on a machine)? If we are found out, is it possible for a machine's security policy to be set by the sysadmin gestapo such that USB drives are not even recognized?