Well firstly, thanks for all the information from here. Managed to get myself a reasonable unattended install of most of what i require - give or take a few awkward hotfixes, but that is a concern for another time. At the moment i am concerned that when installing from my XPCD i get an error message on Coinstal.dll and have to skip the copying of this file. This occours almost imediadtley during the install, at the 'copying files' stage. I would like to know if this is am important file or not? searched forums and googled for this but i can't find one reference to this file- if it is important how to get it to copy during install?