no clue how that happend, but i would like to know, and at my school, the teachers are computer literate, have access to all our files, in some areas can remotle look at what we are doing (see out screen) and take over our comp, and all internet traffic goes through a proxy filter

Well... You can't "bypass" the BIOS's POST on boot, ever. It can, however, just be really fast and disappear from view before you see it, or it could just be the big ol' logo instead of the POST messages. However, nothing about the BIOS would cause XP to give admin rights. The only thing I can think of is that they don't actually shut down the computers, but rather throw it into a suspend mode (which would, when powered back up, give the appearance of bypassing the BIOS, as it isn't booting, but resuming from suspend)

Or maybe they do a network boot, but the USB key screwed up the boot order....

They probably use SyncronEYES.

They probably do now since now install that require reboots are wiped. But we didn't see the BIOS at all before the USB was in. USB Boot was enabled, so that was probably the cause of it. However, the boot order was local drives (which we changed to the CD so that the Ubuntu Live CD would work since we could get to the boot screen). I know it was shut down because we did a reboot before-hand. Before the USB was in, the BIOS screen wasn't shown (or was just that fast that it didn't even flicker) during a reboot. Though, the admin rights might be because the network didn't have a chance to stick its nose into the boot and restrict usage.

actually my school does not use that particulat program, i think it is netsupport school pro or somthing like that