The most painless solution, if your laptop is beefy enough, is to use VMWare to host the stuff you are doing for work. If it makes no difference to you, W2K server is leaner.
If it is simply a matter of receiving files you could request your students to ftp them from, and then back to you - which (I believe) is available natively under XP Pro, or Home with appropriate software. Enumerate directories for them (paying close attention to permissioning) and write some code to give them the ftp put script and there you are.
BOFH