Here's the situation: a non-profit where I volunteer wants to establish a
computer/office skills training program. They've already done a little
pilot work with half a dozen students to figure out what's important to
them and how to present it. It was deemed successful and they've tweaked
a few things as a result.

Recently, the organization has received a donation of half a dozen
desktop and ten laptop machines for this purpose. They are all running
Win 7 Pro (and pass the Win 8.1 readiness test should we decide to go
that route).

I figure we can support the students in two ways and I'm fishing for
suggestions. We can set up a client-server system by using one of the
desktop machines as a server for the others. There is a strong suggestion
by experienced instructors that the students NOT be allowed to store
files locally--on the desktop or laptop machines. A pinch of additional
HD capacity on the designated server would suffice and is inexpensive
these days. It requires a fair bit of setup, however. The other
possibility is to issue thumb drives to the students where their work
files would reside. It has the advantage that their work is portable - if
they have access to other machines they can bring it with them, i.e., to
the local library which provides free computer use.

I have never set up a client-server network on Windows, but I have on
other systems, so I think I could grope my way through it. My question
regarding the thumb drive approach is this: can one set up a portable
drive in such a way as to essentially contain their user environment plus
work files? I presume there would be a userid associated with each thumb
drive. In other words, can what would normally reside in c:\users for
each student live on the USB drive? That would have to include the
Documents folders as well as local settings(?).

TIA,

Jason