Installing Internet Explorer without windows

[Alberto Massari]

Hi Boris,

At 16.06 27/11/2002 -0600, Boris wrote:
>I just tried installing IE 5.5 from setup.exe and it never seems to 
>install properly without windows being installed or modifying files. It 
>would be nice to install Internet Explorer without patching anything. I 
>hope more people work towards that.

I tried to do the same, and now IE 5.5 is (almost) working.
BTW, I needed to emulate the NT plaftorm, so I first tried specifying Win2k 
in the config file; unfortunately the installer in this case only installs 
a bunch of files, skipping the ones it known are already shipped with Win2k 
(most notably, iexplore.exe is missing :-( ). So I settled for emulating 
Win NT 4.0.
Also, I changed the DllOverrides section of the config file to only have
   "setupapi" = "builtin"
   "*" = "native, builtin"

This is the list of hacks I had to do, with the possible resolution:
- the installer requires Win NT 4.0 SP6a; it turned out that the check on 
the presence of SP6a (vs SP6) is this key in the HKLM branch of the registry:

    Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\Hotfix\Q246009
    "Installed"="1"
- the installer assumes the presence of rundll32.exe in c:\windows (now 
it's part of Wine :-) so this is not an issue anymore)
- the installer needs a copy of cabinet.dll from a Windows installation 
(someone is working on a builtin version, so this will not be an issue)
- after the installation has completed, go through the registry and do the 
rename operations found in the System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session 
Manager\PendingFileRenameOperations key and run all the commands found in 
the Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce branch (someone is 
working on a "reboot" feature that will do this automatically, so this will 
not be an issue)
- now you can run IE, but it will crash shortly after having displayed the 
home page; I fixed this by using a native version of ole32.dll and 
rpcrt4.dll coming from an NT 4.0 installation. This could be probably 
avoided by completing the implementations of builtin dlls like urlmon.dll, 
but it's too early to say that...
Even with the 2 dlls in place, pictures are not displayed....

Hope this helps,
Alberto