Re: portable apps :
For 0.9.29+ I've added a commandline --lazarusdir parameter to startlazarus/lazarus to specify the lazarusdir.
If the laz configuration has everything relative to lazarusdir, and is configured with
If people then execute lazarus over a simple batchfile that detects the driveletter, and passes a corrected lazarusdir and --primary-config-dir to startlazarus(I used driveletter\lazarus\config for that), one would already be pretty close with a portable apps installation.
Unfortunately, this hasn't been tested to well yet. For older lazarus versions I used the following script/program:
http://www.stack.nl/~marcov/fixxml.zip, which uses the FPC XML package to fix the lazarusdir in the xml directly