I have what I thought was a fairly simple requirement, but I've been
fighting installer on this and wanted to see if anyone could help out. What
I need is an MSI that installs a handful of files to a location specified in
the registry. That's it -- no shortcuts, no advertising of features, etc.
The only other requirements I have are:

1) It is not added to Add/Remove Programs (I can make this happen for
NT-based platforms but not Win98).
2) If you run the installer again, it will simply perform the same install
as before (i.e., it won't remember that it's already installed and try to
use the "source" installer for its files).

I can mostly fake installer into doing this, but the problem I'm having is
that, if you originally ran the installation from a CD and then a second
time from local disk, the installer prompts for the CD during the
ResolveSource action. I just want installer to always use the package that
was launched as the source -- no caching, no looking for the original source
package, etc.

Any ideas on how to accomplish this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks -
Ken

You're fighting the installer because you don't need most of the
functiomalty it supples. I'd look at something like Package for the Web, an
InstallShield product, something that zips things up into a self-extracting
exe, the Winzip kind of thing. Then the only problem you have is reading
that registry entry and using it as the location, and it might be easier to
solve that problem than all the installer ones you're having.
--
Phil Wilson [MVP Windows Installer]
----
"Ken Kolda" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> I have what I thought was a fairly simple requirement, but I've been
> fighting installer on this and wanted to see if anyone could help out.
What
> I need is an MSI that installs a handful of files to a location specified
in
> the registry. That's it -- no shortcuts, no advertising of features, etc.
> The only other requirements I have are:
>
> 1) It is not added to Add/Remove Programs (I can make this happen for
> NT-based platforms but not Win98).
> 2) If you run the installer again, it will simply perform the same install
> as before (i.e., it won't remember that it's already installed and try to
> use the "source" installer for its files).
>
> I can mostly fake installer into doing this, but the problem I'm having is
> that, if you originally ran the installation from a CD and then a second
> time from local disk, the installer prompts for the CD during the
> ResolveSource action. I just want installer to always use the package that
> was launched as the source -- no caching, no looking for the original
source
> package, etc.
>
> Any ideas on how to accomplish this would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks -
> Ken
>
>