I have been using VMWare workstation for that purpose for a long time (approx 2 years). I have been so extremelly pleased with its performance, that I ended up using 3 different instances. One for development, one to act as a server and one for casual use (You really need a good CPU and quite a bit of RAM), while my "main" environment remained quite free of applications. VMware workstation suited me well due to the quite DirectX support it had (and has still) out of the box. I have used Microsoft's Virtual PC for quite some time as well (4-5 months running in parallel to VMware), and I can say it is a solid solution and works well, but lacks serious DirectX support (at least that was what bugged me at the time). Aside from that, it is really better than any free alternatives I have personally tried. Other than these two, I have very briefly looked at Virtual box, but not enough for me to offer a positive or negative suggestion for. I have to say though that currently I simply have another pc with my server apps and I can say it is the best setup so far, even if I sometimes miss the super clean main environment I had.

Depending on your needs I would suggeste WCF using TCP or MSMQ as the transport layer. Of course this is if you are using Windows.

Definatelly #2. Writting software is hard enough, we dont need to make it more difficult by having to do additional code maintenance created from people like that. I dont want to be mean, but hey, I dealt with a lot of incompetance from 3rd parties latelly.

Just an idea: Why not use a the new TI Launchpad board (or any microcontroller board for that matter) and wire it parallel to the on/off switch of your motherboard. Then programm the Launchpad to close and open a port at a specific time. The wiring is extremelly simple to do even with little knowledge, but a lot of care. We did something similar (shutdown and turn on of a PC through IR receiver and a microcontroller) for a project we had some 10 years back and it was easy even then, so this should be VERY easy now. PS: I just mention the launchpad because it is very cheap, and also it has a thermometer built in. I can understand that most of us have preferences.

While I understand the coolness factor of having a hardware random number generator, really providers like the RNGCryptoServiceProvider .Net class (for example) or the CryptoLib C++ library is more than adequate for almost all uses. Both are valid RNGs that can be used even for security purposes. I have to say though that I would be very happy to see a dedicated hardware RNG on all motherboards.