We've been running Alice 3 off of thumb drives for our computer club students - frequently we're in environments where the computer labs won't allow us to install any software at all. As long as they have a reasonably updated JDK installed, we're usually ok to run Alice 3 and Netbeans off of thumb drive. Obviously the shared folder installation makes more sense if you have access and permission for it. Thanks for posting and please let us know if you have any other or additional Netbeans questions.
Best regards,
-- DanG
Daniel Green, Sun Microsystems
Sun OEM Software,
dang@sun.com