Yet another example of the superiority of the CLI over the GUI.

Or you could have modified the source code to open a listening port for you then left the thumb drive on the table in the break room by the HR department.  At least that is what my evil twin would have done.

I heard a story in one of my classes of someone giving out CD's that had something on them, but I've not heard of anyone doing it with a flash drive.. though I'm sure it's been done.

Have you ever tried Knoppix?

To the question earlier, yes, there are pen testing teams that have physical media drops as part of their assessment.  One of the tiger teams I know used it to really screw with a bank.  They dropped a dozen usb drives in the parking lot that were installed with a piece of code that would fire off when windows auto mounted.  It didn't install anything, just pinged their server so they could get a count.  11 of the 12 were used in the bank, the last was used by a customer on their home system.  As for CD's, that is a story from one of the original black hats.  Someone loaded a trojan onto those little mini-CDs and just walked around the conference throwing them onto the tables of other participants.  Dozens of people picked them up thinking they were demo disks.  The next generation of this is already here, and that is infecting the media on creation.  Foreign governments are pre-loading devices with trojans and just waiting to see where they'll end up.  Other times you'll get people in the factories that will put the malware into memory chips without ever knowing what devices they will get built into...

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/01/digital-picture.html

Have you ever tried Knoppix?
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I have tried slax, nimblex, and mandriva but i have never really been able to get my hands on knoppix.

For folks moving into the security or incident response space for the first time, Knoppix, Helix, and BackTrack are an incredible resource.  As for mounting the windows drive you are going to hit two issues: make sure your linux build is recognizing your usb ports, and using the right file system.  Most of the live CD's will auto sense the usb ports so that shouldn't be an issue, and some of them will automount the drive if it is plugged in when you boot.  If you have to mount it manually, try ntfs first and samba seconds if you can't get ntfs to work.  Another thing to check, if you are trying to mount with one of the linux builds meant for forensics (especially Helix) when you do get it mounted it will be hard set as read only.  It can be a bit of a pain in the hind-quarters to get it mounted as writeable.