paint-like task (cropping pictures)

I need to have a task where participants will crop parts of digital images and place them underneath the original picture, in a blank space. Normally, this can be done in MS Paint or any other image manipulation software, but I need a custom program that recruits a specific image from the hard disk and allows the participant to crop a part of it. No data will need to be recorded from this task.
I am about to hire someone to write this in java, as I could not think of a way to implement this myself. Is this true?
If I have the java program, I'm assuming I can embed it in medialab as often as I want, if I wanted each participant to do the same cropping task on a series of (randomly selected) images. Is this true as well? Never used java and kinda nervous :-D
thanks.

Turns out the Java programmer will bill me for about 200 euros or so at the end. Quite expensive for such a simple program I think.
So I am considering coming up with my own solution, maybe perhaps working outside of medialab. I remembered the batch files (.bat) we used to use from the DOS days, and just wrote a batch file that can open a series of pictures (once the previous picture is closed) in MS Paint. The experimenter can instruct the subject to do the cropping task before running this batch file. Then when they are done, the experiment can start the rest of the experiment on medialab.
This is probably an idiosyncratic situation so I'm not sure if it interests anybody else here, but just thought I'd still write about it while I try to find a solution.

Have you considered launching the paint program from MediaLab using the [I]exe [/I]item type, passing the filename as a parameter?

That is pretty cool, thanks for the tip. I wrote a .bat file that launches Paint and the picture files, then launches directRT. Things are becoming easier and easier as one discovers the features of m-lab and d-rt.

Great to hear--thanks for the update!