I'm a student tech admin at my school,
and most of those are closed. However, yea, with some convuluted registry editing, you might be able to get somewhere... but to be honest, you need to be a bit more wise when telling these guys how to do that shit. Messing with the registry without a backup is some seriously stupid shit, and if you get caught its serious trouble.
Exe's are still executable, but we are setting all computers to do a system restore upon startup. Its pretty easy to turn that off though

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And btw, I saw you brought up torpark. Even with optimal torpark settings, many school networks (especially those on T1 lines) are simply to slow for a stable connection. Even at home, torpark runs impossibly slow.
The only "fast" program I've seen is called "Pingfu". I've tested the trial version at home, and boy its fast...