When I had the "computer room" setup I had two typing tables that I used for the computers. One was an old wooden one and the other was an old metal one. They both worked well. Now that I use a notebook I use a Tablemate next to the recliner. Works great. I have one wooden computer desk and I've never put it together. It's in the basement and will get thrown someday.

I hope not since we have one! Here's ours (in a corner of our family room). I think cord management is critical and the desk needs to complement the rest of the furniture in the room.

I suggest you consider ways to move the following items OFF the desktop. printers, scanner, camera dock. The more you put on that desktop, the less working space you'll have. And working space is actually at a premium. We have our scanner on a shelf You could wall-mount the camera dock, perhaps (or install a shallow shelf on the "backsplash" area of the desk to set it on). A wall mount might be a good way to handle some future gizmo's, too--back-up external hard drive, PDA dock, etc. The smallish ones. Lots of times printers are shown on low carts that roll under--if you can find a way to preserve some "roll it under" space w/ that desk, that might be really useful. I wish I could suggest how to brace that corner without blocking it up completely.

Having seen the pics, these desks strike me as very light-duty, poor-quality items that shouldn't be in a school. You've got a variety of problems for which there's no one magic bullet. You can certainly patch them together somewhat, but getting "many years" more use out of them is not likely. The material is particleboard with a melamine coating - not "laminate." The "connector bolts" you referred to aren't bolts at all. The are a common type of knockdown fastener. Lee Valley carries them, so you can see a picture of the uninstalled fastener here. The post of each fastener is threaded into a barbed plastic insert that's simply pressed into an undersized hole. These fasteners assemble quickly and avoid having screw heads showing on the tops of the desks, but they aren't very strong. When they are pulled loose the barbed plastic fittings are likely to enlarge the once-undersized holes they're in; you can tap the posts back into their holes, but they'll loosen again fairy easily. To make any real headway, assume that each desk will have to be completely disassembled and every compromised joint will have to be fixed somehow. The posts of the knockdown fittings should be tapped back into their holes or turned to screw them deeper into their plastic anchors. Screws that have stripped must be replaced with longer screws, with coarse threads, for which you'll need to drill pilot holes. In the first picture you need to straighten everything out so that the vertical PB (particleboard) member isn't splayed away from the keyboard tray, and tighten up the loose fasteners where possible. Then you'll have to improve on the original design by adding something to keep the problem from recurring. My inclination would be to add a couple of triangular wood gussets between the desktop and the outer face of the vertical PB member that carries the keyboard tray slide. In the second pic you might remove the desktop and try to get the posts of the knockdown fasteners appropriately seated by tapping them down or (maybe) turning them to thread them more deeply into their embedded plastic anchors. As mentioned above, they'll probably come loose again, and do so more easily the second time. In the long run you may have to drill down through the desktop and drive some screws into the legs. This may be an unappetizing thought but, done right, it could add a lot of strength. It's harder to see what's going on in the third pic, but perhaps the keyboard tray falls in the student's lap because of the splaying shown in the first pic? Adding the gussets I described, to prevent the splaying, should address this problem as well. In the last pic, where a chunk of the PB is gone, there's no way to put Humpty Dumpty back together the way he was originally. See if you can relocate the fastener that blew out to another, undamaged part of the edge.