I want to create a portable VM setup so that I can boot a Linux install regardless of which Windows XP / Windows 7 host machine I am on.
I was looking at Qemu but it doesn't appear to have a relatively safe win32 build (The build I found in Google noted that it had recently had an "infected" USB driver). There was also another Qemu build but I'm not sure it's even the right path do go down.
Other environments like VirtualBox require complete install on the host OS for performance reasons. I'm not so concerned about performance, I just want to run a few curses based applications.
My ideal end goal would be a a memory stick of some size with a VM/Emulator I can boot on most WinXP/Windows 7 machines and access my own curses based applications (probably Arch Linux or Debian).
Any help would be appreciated.