Yeah, I know, I'm always asking the difficult ones :-)

But let's say I wrote a program which encrypted EXEs for safety reasons. Is there a way in which I could, once having decrypted them, put the EXE into a specific area in memory or something and execute it without writing it back to HD? This is just a theoretical, not something I am actually planning to do or anything (yet :-)).

Something like this could also be used for data security and program control (ensuring only certain people run your program and it can't be stolen or used on another PC.

I do (as I write this) see the potential security flaws in this idea, as this is probably exactly how viruses and such get around, but is there a safe way to do this?