ALLUSERS confusion

[Glen_T]

I have a number of legacy InstallShield Express projects that were imported into ISX 12. The default setting for the ALLUSERS flag was "" when those projects were imported (not 1).

I wanted to set a few of these projects to allow installing for "anyone who users this computer" so I set ALLUSERS to "2". This works and presents a choice to the user on the READY TO INSTALL dialog box to either install for "only me" or "anyone who uses this computer (all users)".

However, I discovered that if the user elects to install for "only me" (current user) under Win7, the program files are put into the user's profile rather than into C:\Program Files\... This is bad. It breaks our updaters.

So I want to turn off (hide) the option to install for "only me" on the READY TO INSTALL dialog box. But now, no matter what I set the ALLUSERS flag to ("" or 1 or 2) I can't get rid of the "Install this application for" options that are presented to the end user. However, my other projects which I have not fiddled with (ALLUSERS defaulting to "") do not present these options.

How do I turn off the user options on the READY TO INSTALL dialog while retaining install for all users as the default in Windows 7?

Note: I have a copy of ORCA if I need to repair the .ISE files.

[Glen_T]

OK, I think I found the answers:

First, if you are upgrading projects to ISX12, the inherited default setting for ALLUSERS (found under General Information page) is an empty string ("") meaning "per-user installation". However, if you create a new ISX12 project from scratch the default for ALLUSERS is actually set to "1" meaning "Per-machine installation".

Second, if you want to enable/disable giving the end user a choice of per-user or per-machine installations, that option is hidden under "Customize the Setup Appearance > Dialogs > Dialogs" (select the top level Dialogs item in the tree view) and look for Show All Users Option (default is No). Note that this optiona has two settings: "Yes for all systems" and "Yes for Windows 7 and later". Note that these do different things. Windows 7 will create a special Program Files folder under the user profile, rather than putting the program files in c:\Program Files like on other systems.

But wait, there's more:

Third, if you want to actually show the All Users Option to your end user, you must a) enable the Customer Information dialog box (all versions of Windows up to Windows 7) and/or enable the Ready to Install dialog box (Windows 7 or later). The option actually is shown on different dialog boxes, depending on which version of Windows is in use.

Finally, even if you choose ALLUSERS=1, in Windows 7 if the user choice option is turned on, and the user selects per-user install type, the ALLUSERS flag will be ignored.

Hope this helps others who get lost trying to sort out these not-obvious options in ISX12.