Terry,

I'm wondering if you couldn't create a loader program using WSH (Windows Scripting Shell). You could place your loader program on your hard drive and point your shortcut to your loader program. Your loader program could query the local CD drives (WSH provides this information) and determine if a CD with the application you want to run is installed in one of your CD drives. If so it would run the application from the CD (you can run a VFP application from a CD withOUT installing its runtime DLL's on a hard drive - just make sure the runtime DLL's are in the folder on your CD where your application is located). If your loader application can't find a CD with your application it could display a message box prompting the user to insert the appropriate CD.

The advantages to this approach are:

1. WSH scripts are simply ASCII text files (although I do believe there's a way to create encrypted versions of a script). Because they're just text files, a loader program like I described above would be very small, certainly less than 16K! (yes, that's 16K).

2. By having your loader program check all local CD drives, you eliminate the problem of users changing the CD drive they insert your CD into.

Note that in order for this approach to work, your users must have WSH installed and activated. By default all workstations with Windows 98 on have WSH installed although some shops intentionally disable WSH (for fear of WSH 'viruses'). MS provides a free WSH download for Windows 95 and Windows NT users.

If you don't feel comfortable with WSH, check out Winbatch (search Google for the vendor's site). Winbatch allows you to write scripts that can be compiled to small EXE's (require a 'small' runtime as well).

Let us know what technique you come up with.

Good luck!
Malcolm

>I am trying to create an installation with the new Install Shield for VFP7. I have successfully placed an icon on the desktop (that works) to run the program when a full install is selected. What I have not been able to do is put an icon on the desktop and run the program from CD. If I do a minimal installation and want to run from the CD, what is the sintax I use for the Target?