Are there any alternatives to ThinApp (preferably free)?

[Nazo]

So I really like the idea of VMWare ThinApp and I recently had occasion to use it for a couple of things and see how it works. It actually encapsulates programs each in their own individual sandbox. This not only has the advantages of sandboxing but also it means each ThinApped program has everything it needs (more or less) all together inside that sandbox -- registry keys and all. There is no need to reinstall every single program, much less going through all the steps to reconfigure. This is the closest I've ever seen on a PC to something equivalent to what Android does where you can even just backup apps at will (if you have root anyway -- I think maybe adb can do it too, but I never figured out how and Google doesn't talk much about it like they don't want people to do it for some reason) and then just restore them and their data at will. It still doesn't separate the actual program from its data and doing things like updates require you to basically redo the entire thing, but it is pretty close. With something like it I would be able to have my programs complete with their configuration across multiple devices. It also would mean when reinstalling a system I could carry stuff across with configuration and all intact just like what TitaniumBackup enables me to do with Android.

However, ThinApp is not just commercial, but basically not even for normal people to use at all. It's pretty much for corporations only. Especially its pricing... I would like to find something that is either actually really cheap (like $20, not $100) or preferably free (I'm pretty broke, so free is strongly preferable actually.) Ideally open source. Something easy enough to use without having to actually do hex editing or programming or whatever to try to force programs to work with it.

Obviously this doesn't work with everything. And stuff like drivers, codecs, etc etc are too fundamental and need to be installed system-level obviously. But for various things like my image editing software it could be terribly useful.