They, in fact, changed their minds and wanted XP -- I guess some of the staff felt this to be a better choice as THEY would have to support the students!
Given XP, I opted to save a few bucks for them and went with MS's SteadyState (free if you can find an archived copy). This was tedious to install (cuz it keeps wanting to throw away your changes!) and poorly documented (probably 100 settings and the documentation for each consists of essentially the *label* alongside each checkbox!!).
Most annoying is the MS approach that "they know best" how things should be set up. So, they silently make changes to your settings that aren't immediately visible -- unless you are disciplined to VERIFY them, after the fact!
So, after a fair bit of experimentation, I've been able to set up
*a* (test) machine with all the applications they wanted/needed to see how well it fares, deployed.It's a bit sluggish booting and shutting down/restarting. But, nothing unusual for a MS product :-/
I'll clone the first system onto the remaining 9 once they bless its operation. Maybe next week...
This *may* be a viable solution (kludge) for folks wanting to keep XP running past April...