Recently discovered MobaLiveCD (well, it ain't very new thing but can't discover everything at once... :) that allows you to run your Live-CD on Windows into an emulation window. I have tested this with several different bootable images (few different Linux Live-CD, hirens Boot-CD and even Windows 2000 install media...:) and everything seems to be working quite smoothly, even bit slowly.
MobaLiveCD in based on Qemu and is an standalone binary so it's pretty easy to put this and Live-CD image to USB-stick and go for it. It's can't be easier than this!
It lacks currently options to adjust CPU cycles and memory for virtual sessions but I have already contacted developers and they promised to look for this functionality for next versions.
MobaLiveCD.
MobaTek have also _very_ nice free portable X server with Unix/Cygwin utilities and a tab-based console (MobaXVT) and MobaSSH, SSH wrapper for Unix/Cygwin shell (I have never seen before this kind of nice and easy sshd for windows). Those two are highly recommended for evaluating and hopefully someone have spare time to make review from all of those nice _portable_ FREE utils. They deserve it!