>In my environment creating install disks for every modification simply isn't practical. The applications reside on the servers, and because of multiple users the actual install simply copies the necessary runtime files and controls to the local machine and creates the icons and folders by means of a post-setup executable.

You don't have to actually make physical disks for that, of course. I was just thinking that a program like InstallShield, which is designed to handle this sort of thing, might be better than reinventing the wheel.

>One the things that happens during the initialization of the main exe (applications are usually app files) is that it checks to make sure the controls are up to date.

For example, what happens if the controls are not up to date, but they're being used by another app (or the OS), so that you can't just copy over the old versions? InstallShield can take care of this by updating the controls after rebooting.

Don't get me wrong: I'm sure you've thought about all of this and have a solution that works perfectly well. :)