Something I stumbled upon...

Now I've only just found this, so I assume the rest of the world figured this out long ago however it might be of use to someone else...

First off if like me you get lots of people wanting to borrow you XP CD's (cos they've 'misplaced' theirs) but you want to include a load of little extras on your CD (I have Visual Studio which most of my friends tend not to want... or understand), you could include a line in whatever batch file you run from cmdlines.txt such as...

if not exist a:\nostudio.txt regedit /s VStudio.reg

This way if you want to avoid a component being installed all you do is create a blank text file on a floppy disk called nostudio.txt (or whatever) and if it's found that component will not be installed. Just remeber if you are splitting you installation registry files into multiple segments (I have options for both Visual Studio and OfficeXP) that you still have to continue the consecutive numbering of the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnceEx statements otherwise they will overwrite each other and things will be missed out of the install.

The second thing I found (which is really REALLY obvious I know...) but if you are adding registry values of:

[HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnceEx\zz107]

1="dosomething.exe"

"Were doing something or other"

You can also include a 2= and a 3= etc...

This is great if you want just the one line to explain what stage your installation is at such as "Installing Microsoft Visual Studio 6" as opposed to "Preinstalling VS6" and "Really installing VS6 now".

I know these are both fairly obvious things but I hope someone will have a use for them.