I am looking at manners in which my student could use their laptops as an ad-hoc wireless network. I need raw sockets so I can program directly on the link layer, so I guess libpcap or winpcap will do. It is also rumored that even Linux under VMWare is able to directly address the network interface, even if Windows XP should disallow it.
Anyway, I stumbled on Ping Tunnel, which should contain all code to do raw socket programming.