I'm going through a built set up now myself again and I'm cursing the Installshield setup. I think it's very frustrating that Express gets you there 95% of the way and then leaves you hanging...
My biggest problem with it is that it builds very large installs. I ended up not using any merge modules and manually building the install for the runtimes and support DLLs and that works for the most part, but IS won't register some components.
The other thing that bites is that Windows Installer runtimes and the lack of a consistent link on the Microsoft site to download the latest version. It's either ship the Installer runtimes in the EXE (which adds 3 megs) or have a link on your own site to download them. It's just another one of those MS ideas that runs into versioning issues.
You mention the full version helps in reducing size. What is in there to help with that?
+++ RIck ---