Scripting

The First suggestion would of course be DO NOT DO IT!
That being said I understand that there are sometimes good reasons to play Russian Roulette with a fully loaded Gun.

I have done just such a thing a few times.

I have found that the best method is to run the installations from a controlling executable.

Compiled WinBatch was the easiest with its native "RunWaite" function.

I have also done it in VB, but handling the run thread completion can be cumbersome.

Regards,

Ok, thank you. I will give that a shot!

I'm not sure why Robo Scripter has a problem with chaining MSIs. We use long chains of applications in our post-deployment scripts (unique business units and machine types) and include scores of MSI's as well as other scripted apps. There are over 1600 machines with our post-deployment image on them and we're unaware of any chained MSI's causing problems. You just need to test your process thoroughly to ensure that they don't step on each other.

Chaining MSI installs is no big deal AS LONG AS:

1) each MSI install happens seperately - otherwise you will get errors saying that the installer service is already in use.

2) none of the MSIs requires a reboot. Even if you set REBOOT to ReallySupress, if one of your MSIs requires a reboot, the installer service will NOT allow any additonal MSIs to be installed until the system has been rebooted.

An exception to this: SMS can deploy multiple MSIs, even ones requiring reboot, as long as SMS has been told to reboot when all pending jobs have been pushed.