Computing Courses and Configuration

Up until recently Computing courses have pretty much been small scale for us with a total block on .exe's for staff and students in their My Docs / USB drives and shared areas to lock everything down using group policies and FSRM. We now have to consider changes to allow programs such as Small / Visual Basic and Panther for a computing roll out for all students from June onwards requiring the running of .exe's. I was wondering for those that have already gone down Small / Visual Basic route what is the best way to configure the system to keep the network secure. Possibly thought of virtual machines running on a student desktop with no internet or network access but this is expensive with VM Workstation at £80 a licence and could very well be overkill. Ant thoughts would be welcome.

Not ideal, far from it, but for computer students we map another drive, which allows them to run .exe's etc and a tiny work area and keep an eye on that location.

Could you not just put the computing cources computers in a seprate OU in AD with a policy so they can run exe's. This way they can run anything but they should only be in the room when supervised.

Supervised users hmmm....

We also have multiple users use computer rooms so it had to be user targeted.

Bumping this thread, coz I'm very interested in this topic. Any advice on how others allow computer programming without compromising network integrity and security would be most welcome...

Thank you