I need to create a single installer that I can distribute to machines running one of Windows XP or Vista. The installer needs to do the following:
1) Check if the OS is XP SP3 or Vista. If it’s vanilla XP or SP1, run an MSI. This will install Remote Desktop 6.1.
2) Run an executable. This is the installation file for a VPN client application.
3) Run a RemoteApp deployment MSI.
4) If the OS is XP, edit the registry as per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951608 in order to enable Network Level Authentication for Remote Desktop. This requires appending to existing registry keys (i.e. not overwriting their existing values).
Initially, I’d hoped to do this with a simple batch file, but I read that it’s impossible to append values to a registry key — I can only create new ones or overwrite old ones. I’ve looked into a couple of GUI installers, but I haven’t found one that will simply run another installation executable. I’ve also looked at NSIS, but learning an entirely new scripting language seems a bit like overkill.
Any simple solutions out there?
Isn’t an append to a registry key a matter of reading the current value, concatenating your new data and overwriting the key with the combined result? I would think that would be doable in a batch script.