I created a self extracting reports.exe file and moved my 400 .frx and .frt files to it.
In ISE, under "Customize the setup appearance/Dialogs/Program File" I added the
line

[INSTALLDIR]\reports.exe

However, my reports are extracted to wrong directory !
ISE runs this command in such way that
default directory is the directory where setup.exe was run.
How to use your suggestion so that installation can be done without manually
selecting intallation directory twice?

Also, during installation ISE allows to disable this extraction
by unchecking [X] Launch program item. If user unchecks it, my post-setup exe
will not run. How to make post-setup exe to run always ?

Putting No to launch program item field completely disables this program run.
After setting launch program to Yes again, launch program is enabled.
however, if setup.exe is run, the
launch program checkbox in now unselected by default!
The only way to making it
selected by default again is to re-create the whole setup from empty file. Is this next IES bug ?

>You could provide these files in a self-extraction EXE. Then you could either provide that EXE separately for the end-user to extract. Another idea is to create a ZIP file and a post-setup executable to run. Have the Post-Setup executable use DynaZip or some other 3rd party unzip utility to unzip the file to where you need it.
>
>>I will not buy full Installshield even if it works.
>>So I consider this question unnessecary.
>>However, I need to make a setup disks from those 488 files. The number of
>>files to distribute will change slightly, but frequently from distribution to distribution.
>>How I can create a setup ?
>>
>>>OK, I can duplicate what you are observing. You do get a decaying performance curve as more files are added to a file folder. I even tried adding 50 files at a time to the same folder. The performance decline was the same regardless of how I tried to copy the files there. Post a new thread to those using the full version if InstallShield and ask if they see this same degradation in performance.