Application Suite package questions

I have a huge collection of files and variously-implemented setups. Because of OS licensing issues, we needed to come up with a way to do an automated build of all of our stuff onto a pre-installed OS - XP. Rather than approach this with a huge ugly batch file, we decided to go with Admin Studio 6, repackage the apps into msi's, and make one "mother ship" package that installs everything all at once, as close to automated as possible. This all is working pretty good, but there are a couple of things I'm not happy with and maybe there are better ways to do this - I'm open to suggestions!

What I want it to do (and how I made it do this) is:

My "mother ship" package kicks off and asks 1 option. Then it runs about 7 msi's, all "run from source" (*1 see question below)

Then it copies several hundred files (they're in components, it's not a batch file)

The it runs a few custom action exe's and batch files to create user accounts and do sharing (it was a lot of work to figure out the vbscript to do this, maybe in a later release I'll change how I do this)

The main thing I'm wondering about here is the nested vs prerequisite question. Nested MSIs seemed the obvious choice for bundling all these apps up. And when I tried using prerequisites, it brought up more dialogs and questions for the users. The user should not have a choice if they want these installed. So is nesting the best way to go about it? It would be nice to be able to repair or patch nested msi's but I've read that nesting precludes that.

So is there a better way? My app works, but it seems like a jerry-rigged way to do things...

Sorry so long for my first post here... thanks for the help

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*1 - I would like to put all the nested msi's in a subdirectory on the CD, but when I choose "Run from Source" it wants to copy the file itself, and I can't figure out how it decides where to put them. the root on the CD is pretty cluttered as a result.

RichM

Stefan Krueger