Why is this a piece of desktop software? It seems to me that this is something people will want to use maybe once a year -- exactly where the convenience of a web application is most important.
I use it once every couple of weeks to tweak seating plans for my classes as I discover new relationships between the kids.
Desktop software because the SA algorithm placed too much load on the server, it started off as a Ruby web-app. Also desktop because most school networks have pretty draconian filtering in place.