>>>What about this? How about the VS Installer as an automation server? Hmmm? Consider the possiblilities there.
>>
>>What would control it? IOW, whose the client? A VBS script?
>
>Control from VFP or VB script or whatever you like. In VFP, it'd just take a small prg to do the work for you. Provided what functionality was exposed, theoretically, you could automate the whole process.

And then compile and distribute that? Are there two different files, one that houses the VFP code, and one that houses the compressed distributables? Maybe this is all trivial, but it seems to me at first glance that an installer has to be somewhat of a self-contained product, because it does its job on the client side. It can't use COM interfaces, because it would have to include the dlls, extract them, register them, and then use them for the rest of the install. Since a lot of what an installer does is this sort of functionality anyway, now you have completely duplicated functionality in the distrib file. With the idea of automation from an install comes a lot of chicken and egg questions. Dig?