troubles with DLLs in $SUPPORTDIR$

[Will]

This is the same problem I have had when I mentioned it in pre-sales. I have placed all the .dlls that i need into the Support Files section of the installer. I have checked the support directory during the install and indeed all of the DLLs that i need are there. Upon testing the install on a different machine, none of the DLLs work at all, I get a "DLLLOADFAILED" error. This is different than my original machine that I tested it on, which loaded one of the DLLs and got exceptions when calling functions in that DLL that depended on another DLL. In any case, something is not right. Does the InstallAware Second revision beta fix this if this is indeed a problem with installaware?

[Will]

BTW the way i got the install to work completely on my machine was by copying all the necessary dlls into the directory where the setup.exe was located. This did not work on the other machine i tested it on.

[Will]

The issue was that MSVCRT71.dll was not found. I placed that dll, along with every other .dll I use into the same directory as the uncompressed setup executable directory.

I still cannot get stuff to work unless I copy all the dlls that i use to the uncompressed setup directory after compilation. This is a total pain in the ass because every time i recompile to test, I have to copy those files. It also makes it impossible for me to use a single-exe type build since the .dlls i need cannot be referenced.

[sinan]

I doubt this is a problem with InstallAware. I'd recommend the following: add all the required DLLs as Support Files, as you say you have already tried; also, change the directory to $SUPPORTDIR$ before actually invoking the DLLs. That should resolve DLL loading problems that Windows has.

If you're still having issues...send me your setup project (please do not email it, but instead provide a download link to it), and I'll see what I can figure out for you.

[Will]

how do i change directories?

[sinan]

I would call the WinAPI functions directly using the Call DLL Function plug-in, I believe the SetCurrentDirectory API in kernel32.dll should work fine.

[Will]

I was able to change directories to the SUPPORTDIR, but the dll calls still failed with 'EXTERNALEXCEPTION' I copied the needed dlls to the setup.exe directory and the setup worked.
If you want to see my install project, what is the minimum that i have to send you?