PDW & Visual Studio Installer

I have PDW and Visual Studio Installer.
1. When installing my package on older operating systems, the MSI file extension is not recognizable. What files do I need to include on my CD for the user to install first before the MSI file extension is read?
2. The PDW often finds files out of date on older operating systems and requires a reboot. How do I automatically continue the installation without the user having to run setup.exe again?
Please Help!

1) You need MSIINSTA.EXE for Win9x and MSIINSTW.EXE for WinNT. Try looking for them on MS's website. They install the Windows installer service. You do not need them for Win2K or XP as they both have the installer already.

2) It should do that anyway.

The version of the P&DW I use doesn't resume after a reboot, you have to run setup yourself again.

1. Thanks, but don't you mean InstMsiA.exe and InstMsiW.exe? I can't find the files names you mentioned on MS. How would I autodetect the operating system and/ or whether the pc can recognise the msi file extension in the autorun.inf? Is this where I would do the autodetect or should I write a separate vb app?

2. I also discovered that I wasn't using autorun.inf on the CD, I was running straight from setup.exe, that's why it didn't continue the installation for the PDW.

Thanks once again for your help!

Is this where I would do the autodetect or should I write a separate vb app?
You could not use a VB app because you could need the runtimes installed to run the setup program. You would need to write such a program in C.

I use Installshield and the way they do it is to allow you to include a setup.exe program along with the MSI. This does the work of detecting the OS and whether or not the installer needs to be installed. You need the following API functions:

GetVersionEx
Reg* functions to look at HKCR\.MSI to see if it is already installed.

I found the following site http://www.vinga.se/products/shareware/vssetup/default.htm
They have created a setup.exe for Windows Installer. I downloaded the file and made a setup.ini file according to their specs. (just edited the ini to contain my program name).

Their setup.exe checks to see which operating system is being used and runs instmsi.exe accordingly. All I have to do is make autorun.inf to run setup.exe and hopefully all my troubles are over. Thanks for setting me on the right path!