| The machine in question is Windows 8 which when the app was installed
| it worked perfectly then all of a sudden our app slowed down to a
| crawl and some menu choices quit working. I thought that maybe
| I had over wrote some need files. But all the other apps on the
| computer still work fine.
|
| Ever hear of this ?
|
That's a very general question.
On the PDW, there's no reason to ship any system
files. You can't install them, anyway. If you're shipping
your own DLLs don't mark them as shared. (Assuming
they're not.) Shipping newer system files won't hurt, in
the sense that XP+ won't let you install them. But it
would put the PDW into a reboot loop. It arranges to
install the system files during reboot, then finds they
didn't install and starts all over again. (There was no
System File Protection in '98.)
As Mike said, there is a slight bug in the code as well.
It's not critical. It's just that when the PDW compares
files it checks the versions, which works fine, but if it
can't find versions it will then check dates. The date code
is backward, so that the PDW would try to install the older
file in that case. But none of that should matter because
it shouldn't be trying to install anything -- and you shouldn't
be shipping anything -- that's a system file.
As others have said, there are other free installers
available. On the other hand, the PDW source code is
available so that a PDW install is entirely customizable.
If you're curious I have two updated and cleaned up versions
here:
http://www.jsware.net/jsware/vbcode.php5
One version is just a cleaned-up version of the PDW with
some updated functions added, like Desktop shortcut option,
App Data folder creation, etc. The second version is a further
rewrite that eliminates the need for setup.exe. Setup.exe
is a C++ EXE that was only needed because the VB6 runtime
was not always installed on target PCs. But the VB6 runtime
has been a system file since Windows 2000, and setup.exe
also did some ugly things -- like that weird gray borderless
window at startup that says something like, "Please wait...",
and some odd behavior that involved moving the install files
into \Windows\ before running the install.
The updated versions linked above are more work, but there
are full instructions with them, and if you use your own rewrite
of setup1.exe you get the advatage that you can fully customize
the UI, add your own license clickthrough, and add just about
any other functionality you like. Since all PCs now have the
VB6 runtime there's no reason that an installer has to be other
than VB.