I'll try to explain this, it's a little tricky:

I'm using ISE 3.53, the one that sells for a few $100s, not the ISE that comes with VFP, or the ISPro version. ISE 3.53 is kind of in-between as far as features, I would say. I have no budget for ISPro, so that solution, if it is one, is not possible for quite some time.

All my ISE 3.53 setups for Win9x and NT4 vfp applications have installed fine in the past. For NT4, I place my EXE shortcuts in the All Users profile, and ISE places the runtimes into System32. No problems, except an Admin must do the installs with our C2 security. But we're all accustomed to that at my workplace, so no problem. We have no Win2K machines except servers, so that's not relevant.

For WinXP Pro, ISE creates a "DLL-Hell" type of install, where the vfp runtimes are "registered" and placed into Program Files/MS Shared...Common.../VFP. But when I load my shortcuts (with a post-executable) into the All Users Profile (desktop, start menu), a vfp7 exe will run fine from the shortcuts for whichever Admin installs it, usually me. But no one else can run a vfp exe with this configuration, they get a "VFP runtimes cannot be located" error.

But, then if I:

a) copy the vfp runtimes to XP's System32 (this part can be automated), and

b) manually copy a vfp-app's shortcuts into any user's personal NTFS Profile, all works fine. I've been doing that on our few XP machines so far, and it's okay in a pinch, but somewhat unprofessional, and when we have a full XP upgrade for all users, it'll get a lot worse. I'm not remedying DLL Hell at all, and it's a very clunky configuration, since it totally bypasses the registry. No clean uninstalls, a non-standard setup, etc. Yuck.

So there are 2 basic problems I want to resolve: 1) dumping the unregistered runtimes into XP's System32 instead of using the properly registered Program Files vfp runtimes, and 2) there is no way to know who the proper users of any given machine are in order to automate placing the shortcuts in the right Profile(s).

Or, is all this totally abnormal? It's occurred to me that our NTFS C2 security may be interfering somehow, but it beats me just how. I've even tried giving a user full Admin control on an entire XP machine, but no change to my problems with my standard IS XP setup...though it resulted in another poor workaround install method: elevate the user to full admin rights, run the IS install under their account, and then bump them back to a lockdown C2-level user. That works, but again, it's a very sloppy method for this day & age.

I've read that with WinXP, it's somehow possible to do an Admin install while a locked-down user is still logged on. That might be the fix I'm seeking. Anyone know how to do this? Or any other suggestions, aside from an ISPro upgrade?