Can't Run Outlook when Install finishes

[tobyteel]

When my installer finishes, I'd like to open MS Outlook. I've found the path to Outlook.exe in the registry. The "Run Program" command won't open outlook, though. I also tried "Run Program As" with the starting directory set to the directory containing outlook.exe, and used SetCurrentDirectoryA in shell32.dll to set the working directory. I've also tried executing cmd.exe "$OUTLOOK_PATH$" and cmd.exe /C "start "$OUTLOOK_PATH$"". The "Run Program cmd.exe" windows seem to open for a split second and then close, but no Outlook.

Is there any other way to open a program? Could I use the program's GUID from the registry? My next plan is to use VBScript and the Outlook object model to open outlook, but this relies on cscript or wscript which I'm not convinced is always available.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.
-Toby

[giaviv]

Dear Toby,

In this specific case what I would do is simply call "Run Program" with the program name "outlook". When you install Office on your computer, Microsoft adds outlook to your PATH, and therefore when you execute Start -> Run and type "outlook" - outlook will run.
This work similarly with notepad, calc, cmd and so forth.

Good luck,
Aviv Giladi
InstallAware

[tobyteel]

Unreal. That totally worked. Thanks a ton.