One would have to be spending a lot of time under a rock to not be aware of the loss and recovery one of the Veteran Administration's laptops. The now former employee was probably a dedicated staffer who took his job seriously and unfortunately, also literally took his work home with him. That got me to thinking about the risks at my institution and I suspect we will be making some changes over the next few months. Here's another recent theft that occurred at HEd. institution. Our future direction will no doubt include many of the suggestions found here.
Of course the easy solution is Mac OS X which offers the one-click option to encrypt your entire home directory (and other nice security features.)
Any security-minded IT organization who isn't seriously considering Mac OS X is not seeing the real issues.
Thanks for the suggestion. Perhaps this will be something we should consider until Vista comes out. As I understand, there is something called Bitlocker Drive Encryption that provides off-line data protection. Here's more info on Bitlocker: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/library/c61f2a12-8ae6-4957-b031-97b4d762cf31.mspx