Q: XP SteadyState and Termination on Exit I know that SteadyState is no longer supported by Microsoft, but I am faced with helping a school that has 100 XP PCs with no money to change to anything else right now — and no motivation to change.
They have a mess of machines because they have no server. No knowledge. SteadyState is just what they need. 
But, after installation and setup — all which went OK — there is an issue at shutdown. The SteadyState program has to abnormally terminate with the "End this program" dialog in the "dumb" account with limited access setup for students. If I login and end another account with admin rights there's no issue. 
So, do you know if we have to grant the "student" account higher rights to terminate the service? And does it make any difference since we are running the disk protection and reset on logout? I could block the program access to the steady state console so that any change isn't a change?

A: If your users have sufficient privileges to terminate the service... then they would have sufficient permissions to kill it anytime they wanted, thereby rendering steady-state useless.  Honestly, as long as you're not running it on windows 7... there shouldn't be problems.  If you're trying to run it in 7... give up.  Switch to something like deep-freeze or returnil that actually support windows 7.  
If you're not running on 7... it would be better to look into the causes/reasons behind the abnormal termination... and maybe you can get that working properly instead of trying to re-invent the wheel.

A: I'm going with XP Pro. Users are configured via the Steady State create user. I will investigate further why it was abnormally terminating -- it is as if the service cannot be stopped by the user created by Steady State. 
I looked at returnil/deep-freeze, but they are commercial and right now $$$ is very tight in lower education.
