>Do you feel that MS made a mistake by using I.E. Express instead of the old installer in VFP 7? I do! The purpose of the installer is to get your application on the user's computer. An installer is something your application users run a single time and only use for a couple of minutes. So why do we need to spend days learning about and troubleshoot ISE problems?
>
>Before 7 I never worried about the Installation of my application. I simply ran the good old Setup Wizard and in a couple of minutes I was done. The major problem of the old setup wizard is that it did not create shortcuts on the desktop, but that was no big deal. With version 7.0 I find myself spending a lot of time troubleshooting InstallShield problems. Actually, we just finished a new release of our VFP application. All the complicated VFP programming issues are solved. However, we have a major issue now delaying our product's release, and that is an InstallShield problem.
>
>Here it is. Hope someone has solved it:

Solved in VFP, by having the user choose which data directory to use once the app is up and running. They can browse to find the directory, I check to see if it contains proper dbcs, and then it uses that. the value is stored in registry, among other private settings for the current user. The original data directory remains unused - wastes space, but doesn't hurt either.

ISLE (note the LE - "Limited Edition") has lots of quirks, and I think it was just a way to get some burden off the VFP team's back. For one, they don't have to maintain an installer as they did in the previous three versions, and I remember that the old one had more problems than you mention. OTOH, some of the burden is thus passed onto our backs, but we're tough guys around here, we'll survive :)