Program Size Ballons After PDW

My original project, along with the executable, is only 500KB [The project has a Main Form, A Instruction Form (just one page), an About Form that is tiny, and a small Password Form, an MS Access database with only one table and nothing else and one Custom Crystal Report form, that's all.] But once I have used the PDW, the file size ballons to a huge 35MB. What gives? Can it be made smaller? I was hoping to just put this on a floppy.

The setup will never fit on a floppy. You have to distribute the VB runtimes and the DataAccess components (since you're using a database)

35 MB seems a lot though. Are you including the files in the support folder in that total ?

Another thing to check: in your VB project, look under Project -> References and Project -> Components to make sure you don't have any unnecessary dependencies checked here. Occasionally I have added references for testing and forgotten to remove them, which can cause extraneous files to be bundled with the setup package.

Well, first off, you are including the VB Runtime DLLs,which add up to a few MB (msvbvm60.dll is 1.3MB alone), but the real hog is your database. This causes PDW to include MDAC which is huge.

I don't use PDW myself, but it must produce a list of files it is including in the setup (setup.lst perhaps?). Post it here if you find it.

Go to Microsoft's web site: www.microsoft.com and do a search for the Microsoft Visual Studio Installer. (it's free)

Typically this installer program will compress what PDW doesn't. But I don't believe I've ever gotten the program to fit on one floppy disk.

However with Visual Studio installer, what use to be a 35MB install file is now down to about 4-6MB. You can also have it build the files for multi-disk. So it will break down the file so you can take it on 3-6 floppy disks.

Not too bad of a compromise.

Since mdac_typ.exe is always 8-10mb, and it is already a separate
install program made up of many compresssed files, it just isn't
going to get any smaller. While is seems like your app is so small
that is doesn't justify this size, whenever you use an Access
database, you are distributing the whole Jet data engine along
with your app. This still beats having to distribute Access itself.