We are attempting to place all our support files into sub-folders under the main INSTALLDIR and then setting the applications App Paths entries to have the apps search for dependencies from this location.
On XP and Vista this works correctly, but when the application runs on Windows 2000 it fails to find the dependency files!!!
Does Windows 2000 not support the App Paths and if not then does this mean that all supporting dependency files will need to go into the root of the INSTALLDIR?
If there is anyway for the app to load it's dependencies from the support sub-folder then could someone suggest how that can be done.
I am happy for you that this works at all. If you are talking about DLL's then when we tried to use this method we got no results. If you do a search with "dll app path" in MSDN you will see in the first returned link that the dll search order always has the last condition that app paths are not used. There is also some other info in that file that may be of interest. .
No this is only for .exe files and their dependencies. So again if you place the .exe file name and set it's correct App Paths entries then it will work, it is just on 2000 that we are running into an issue.
Oh and by the way we found out that the App Paths will only work if the App that is launched is launched with Shell Execute. If the app is launched be Create Process then it will not use the App Paths.
So we even found out that apps launched at the end of the install would fail to use the App Paths entry. So we figured that InstallShield could launch the app using Create Process instead of Shell Execute. So we had to call another method in the Launch command so that the install would launch the app at the end of the install.
Anyways we'll have to look into the Windows 2000 issue a bit more before deciding if we have to move all the supporting files back into the root of the main INSTALLDIR.
