Hi i am makeing some plugins based onsome of the apps at Portable Apps
and am looking for opinions about file sizes.
Would anyone like to have a smaller file on the livecd, but would have to run from ramdrive or
a larger file on cd but no need to run app from ram drive?
example thunderbird portable:

thunderbird to from ramdrive, 6.4 meg on disk
thunderbird to from from live cd, 22 meg ondisk

This is always a tough decision because what I would choose would depend on if you plan to allow a user to customize it in any manner such as to be able to save the account info to a file or something.

Most of what I have made requires constant updates so I usually use the ramdrive, but for an email client I would think you would at most just make a single change so I'd probably just suggest the direct to the disk myself.

Either way... it really is strickly an opinion issue that the user themselves and what their goals are.

I too have been playing with some of the "portable" applications out there.
I have looked at DeepBurner but read where there are a lot of issues with the current version and they hope to fix them with the 1.9 release. So I haven't worked on updating it for the project yet.
I really like the Opera portable, 1 big file....it's so nice.
FireFox portable is very strange. It has an EXE, but then a lot of folders and most of the FF files still?? I have it working good though, so I guess it doesn't matter.

Not to question your decision, but I wonder why and if you really need Thunderbird? Don't get me wrong I use thunderbird too and it would probably be cool in PE. The project already has a few email clients on it and I rarely need email when fixing a computer. Then again I'm normally around several other computers when working on one!!

So your question. It's a tough one with many different points to address. Running from a ramdrive is always faster, but you have to have a system that will allow you a decent sized ramdisk. Then again, if the CD drive is starting to go bad and it takes a long time to boot, then programs you try to run from it will take a long time to load. You have to worry about size on the CD too if you have a lot of extra "goodies" added to your boot CD.

Personally, I think I would pick running from the ramdisk. Mostly because programs usually behave better when they can write and second because of the fast access time of the ramdisk.

If your creating plugins to be added by the user, then having a choice of both methods would be best. Both have merrit & it would depend on what type of system the users wants to boot as to what method will make more sense.