Patrick,

One thing I haven't seen mentioned in this (strange) thread,

>
> What I was originally thinking was that I could design some helpful
> utilities to automate some of the things I do at work so I thought that
> taking a small .exe compiled from code of my own creation would be more
> acceptable to my company than to take a whole development environment.


I do this sort of stuff all the time. Squeak allows you to write "apps" that
run headless, that is, without the development environment being visible to
the user. Conceptually, basic command line programs and utilities. Takes a
little bit of doing (very little), but basically you end up writing and
testing your app within the development system and then deploy that program
using command line switches at the OS level. I've used this for various
things like file filters, converting HTML files to PDF format and such, but
Squeak deploys much more complicated things like web servers and Swikis this
way too.

Because it looks like any other program, it is transparent to the user as to
what language it was written in.

Jim

PS: If you need simple input from the user, that's a whole 'nother can of
worms, but can be circumvented if you are properly motivated. You may be
able to do this without having to create an island all unto yourself ;-)