Try packing them into Winrar SFX. The problem of using iexpress is that setup.exe launches msiexec and finishes, at which point self-extracting exe decides that it's ok to remove unpacked files. Microsoft has been made aware of this problem in Visual Studio 2010 (sic), but I'm not sure if they fixed it. As far as I know, winzip and 7zip suffer from the same problem. But winrar works, just tried.

I have an excel plugin that I want to distribute as a single installation package, preferably MSI. Is there an easy way of doing this? I have developed a desktop application, which needs to install some DLL in client's GAC, so I distributed it to my clients as a MSI installer. However, every time i. Emma Extranet Sony Mobile Drivers.

Note that unless you are checking for prerequisites, setup.exe is not needed, your users can directly run setup.msi. I will be able to check into this only tonight; for now, some ideas: 1. Make sure file.msi was unpacked there to begin with. One way to find out is running filemon or process monitor; another is to temporary prohibit deleting files in%temp% folder by using folder permissions, hoping that the subdirectory RARSFX winrar creates will inherit them. If it was unpacked but then deleted, try playing with sfx options, also maybe try using console executable in winrar instead of GUI one (tab 'Module').

Consider clickonce deployment instead - 4. As I said above, if there are no prerequisites, consider deploying the msi without the exe. #3 and #4 obviously depend on who your audience is. I have tried making the sfx using temporary folder, and the installation worked. The sample can be downloaded from. It may be a matter of timing though: upon completion of the installation, winrar has deleted unpacked setup.exe, but left msi and accordingly the folder it created under%temp%, so it's not very clean. Maybe this installation was simply 'lucky enough' to lock the msi file before sfx has noticed the completion of setup.exe.

Maybe the best solution is to replace the 'template' setup.bin that visual studio is using to create setup.exe, by the one taken from visual studio 2005. The difference is that setup.exe from vs2005 did not terminate until the installation was finished, which is the core of this problem, so iexpress would work as well.

As I can see however, the status of this bug on Microsoft Connect website is 'fixed'. (also the source of the above suggestion to replace setup.bin).