Hi All,
Some reasons why repackager might take a long time to build, or freeze during the process:
--Older versions of Repackager had a problem where more than ~10000 records (files, registry, *.ini files, etc.) would take a very long time. This has been fixed in the latest releases.
--For very long build times due to a high number of files, sometimes the issue has to do with querying the files on the disk in order to populate the File table. You can get around this by moving the *.irp, *.inc. etc. files to a different folder so that Repackager can't find the files, and then just build the *.ism file for use with InstallShield.
--For hanging on the Registry part of the build process, this can happen if invalid data makes it into the *.nir file. If this is the case, you would have to start slicing out parts of the *.nir file until the cause is evident (usually, it's excessively long binary data, or invalid characters in the key name). For the long binary values, this can happen when you're repackaging MSI's, and it's something that you'll usually want to exclude anyways (except perhaps in the case of Virtualization, since this will need to end up in *.context.msi).
Lastly, I should mention that there really isn't an easy way to get a single *.msi file for Office while still maintaining the best practices that ensure you don't break anything on the target machine. I might suggest creating a wrapper MSI file that uses the MSI 4.5 package chaining feature to push all the different packages one by one. I got about halfway through this a while back before getting redirected to another project, but it seemed to be doable with a bit of work. This approach would also have the advantage of maintaining patching compatibility with Microsoft Updates (since repackaging office would break this).
Hope this helps!
