I could have sworn I've seen how to do this before, but I'm having trouble finding it again, so I'd love some help with it:

Is it possible to set up a Windows user account that has all changes wiped at logout? So the user can log in, do whatever, and when they log out the computer is returned to the state it was in before they logged in?

I have a couple clients with computers set up for public use, and they want this ability. They don't care if it wipes files created or removes any software added while the user was logged in. They just want a way to make sure the computer isn't screwed up for the next person.

Is this possible?

There was definitely a thread about this. Sorry I don't have a link to it though.

It appears something like that was added in Windows 7

http://lifehacker.com/5176876/windows-7-guest-mode-creates-bomb+proof-accounts

Very neat! I like that it's built into Windows, that should make it work a little better than add-on software. I'll have to see if the computers my clients want to use have 7 on them.

Thanks for the link. I had been searching Lifehacker, assuming that's where I'd read about it, but none of my searches were successful.

The article also links to the Microsoft software to do this for XP and Vista.

http://lifehacker.com/397786/kid+proof-your-pc-with-steadystate

And might as well be complete, OS X also has this, as of 10.5 (Lion is 10.7)

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/15600.html

Aha! That is exactly what I ran across in my feed reader a while back (around July of '08, I guess). Thanks for mentioning it. This will be very handy...

Is the workstation is part of a domain, you can also use mandatory profiles:
Create a new domain (not local) account, make it guest level so ot can't alter the system significantly, make it roaming, logon and logoff once so that user data is actually created on domain server.
On domain server, go to that user profile dir and rename NTUSER.DAT to NTUSER.MAN .

That's it.