[paul9]

You are making a mistake in the way you think the Knoppix CD works. It doesn't matter that it is on a writable CD, nothing you do when using Knoppix changes anything on the CD. It is not meant to do that. Some CD Live distributions of Linux will save some user data in a special file or directory on the hard drive. Those distros would save your changes in a persistant way. Try a Mandriva Live distro. The last one I used a few weeks ago will save your data to a windows partition on your hard drive like that. It will not affect your windows installation apart from placing a few files on the drive and using up a little space.