Localized folder locations in Vista

[hlangweg]

We ship our setup in three languages: English, French, German

When testing on a German Windows Vista installation we observed that the folder location in the tree view and the one in the edit control do not match. This might confuse users or lead them to manually correct a location when this is not necessary.

To reproduce this issue with InstallAware 6.6 follow these steps:
- Get Folder Location System->ProgramFiles Directory into PROGRAMFILES
- Set Variable TARGETDIR to $PROGRAMFILES$\\$TITLE$
- Use a PTShellTree on your form, cf. e.g. destination.dfm
- Use a non-English installation of Windows Vista to run the built setup
- When asked to choose a location the folder names in the tree view are localized (e.g. C:\\Programme on a German Vista installation), while the edit control shows the non-localized location (e.g. C:\\Program Files).
- Both the localized and the non-localized folder names are accepted by setup and lead to correct installation in the desired location

However, the setup experience could be improved if both displayed locations matched. We do not intend to build a custom dialog or write a plug-in to circumvent this problem somehow.
Is it reasonable to expect this issue to be fixed in a future 6.x release?

[MichaelNesmith]

That is quite odd for the tree view and the edit control to fall out of sync like that. What is the value of the $PROGRAMFILES$ variable? What happens if you select a different folder in the tree view, and then switch the program files folder again - does the edit control update?

[hlangweg]

The value of the $PROGRAMFILES$ variable is "C:\\Program Files\\" before and after the dialog is shown.
The edit control does not update with the localized folder name shown in the tree view, it always displays the physical folder name on disk.

This behaviour seems to be by design, cf., e.g.:
"What the %$#& is up with localized paths in Vista?"
http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2 ... 87464.aspx
and
"Windows Vista junctions points, MUI and localized folder names"
http://msmvps.com/blogs/carlosq/archive ... names.aspx

It would probably be a good idea to have a non-editable control showing only the localized location. In addition there would have to be a "create folder" button for the tree view control for the user to be able to select a non-existing folder as the target folder. Can this already be achieved with InstallAware (without calling the SH* dll functions directly)? The tree view is able to show the localized folder names, so that information has to be available somewhere.