Fine tuning drive letter assigned to USB flash drive.

Greetings, all.

Let me first take a minute to explain my situation, as it will help you
see what exactly I need.

I am attending a community college which runs Windows XP Pro on the campus
computers. The computers are in "deep freeze", and with the exception of
a few in the library, the computers do not have admin rights.

The drive setup of these computers is as follows:

A: -> Floppy
B: -> Zip 750 drive
C: -> Hard disk
D: -> Network drive
E: -> DVD-ROM

There may be more, but I know there are some free letters in there.

I have a USB flash disk. It does not require any drivers for XP, and it
is setup correctly when plugged in. The only problem is that XP assigns
it drive letter D:, ignoring the fact that there is a network drive
already mounted there. In order to use the drive, you have to go into
local disk management (after plugging the USB drive in) and change D: to
something like U:...i.e., you have to re-assign the drive letter.

The problem with this is that students only have admin priveleges on a
very few computers on campus. I talked to one of the IT people, and they
said that if I could present them with a workaround, they would try it
out. I don't imagine that they will re-map the network drive to a
different letter because they have obviously intentionally assigned it D:.

Is there any way to tell XP to assign any USB drive a letter from a
certain group, or something similar? It must be something that would work
for different USB drives--IOW, it can't depend on the volume label being a
certain thing, or anything like that.

Thank you for your help,
Ben