3 replies to this topic

[Renoir]

First post on this site, so I hope I'm in the right place. If not, sorry about that...

We have an old Setup.exe that was created with IntallShield Express (from the VFP installation CD). We have created a new Setup.exe, but notice some differences in behavior, especially with regards to some OLE type stuff. Something is missing in the new one that existed in the old one. We do not have the ISE file for the old EXE. Can we decompile and compare them using some utility? We would purchase a full version of whatever if it helps us through this issue. Thanks!

[Stefan Krueger]

If the setup is a .msi file (which may be packaged in a self-extracting setup.exe) then you can lok into the msi files and compare them. If it's an old-fashioned (pre-MSI) setup, I'm not sure there's a way to decompile it.

Launch the setup. While the Welcome dialog is on screen, go to your TEMP folder and look for the extracted setup files. (might also be in some other place, use Sysinternal's FileMon to find out). If you find a .msi file you can open it with Orca or use a MSI diff tool.

[bogdan]

Renoir, try to decompile Setup.exe with 7-Zip.

[Glytzhkof]

For OLE / COM problems I somtimes use OLEView.exe to test class instantiation. Are you using any common runtimes such as crystal reports? It is hard to guess more without knowing if this is VB6, C++ or managed code.