It's just the way it is. There is a delay between seeing the extraction windows and the InstallWelcome dialog because they come from running 2 different applications. The first application being run is the setup.exe, which extracts the msi and setup prerequisites to the temp folder. After the setup.exe has done it's job, it triggers a different program to run called msiexec and gives it your msi file location as a parameter. The time with no GUI is the time between setup.exe extraction and msiexec loading your msi, which contains InstallWelcome. There are 2 things you can do to speed things up, although they may not be desirable. 1) Change Compression to Uncompressed. 2) Change Installshield Prerequisites Location to "Copy from Source Media". These changes will make it so your CAB files and prereqs are staged alongside your setup.exe instead of embedded within it, therefor it doesn't need to extract it all when you run it. It's nice to be able to just distribute a single file though so you might not want to do this. ... View more