Customers having problems with .exe downloads - how to solve?

[newengland]

Hi

There are well-documented cache related problems with IE6 and IE7....see

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/corrupted_downloads/

Plenty of our customers complain that they cannot download and run our installer files. Needless to say, this is a problem for our business.

We have noticed that Acrobat Reader, for example, begins with a tiny download which then seems to take charge of installing the product.

Have other users solved this issue? We would really appreciate some feedback.

Thanks.

[upeters]

I think you may use the same approach as you described, if you need to. You could build a small "stub", which doesn't really install anything, just downloads the main installer from your site, using the more appropriate FTP protocol for downloading a file. Then, once you have downloaded the package, run it afterwards using File.Run() for exe or Shell.Execute() or yet some of the new MSI actions for MSI-based installers.

To make this happen, you will need the FTP plugin (http://www.indigorose.com/webhelp/plugins/ftp_plugin.htm). If you are a licensed user of AutoPlay Media Studio 7.0, you already have the plugin - just copy the whole "FTP" folder from AMS's Plugins\Actions to SUF's Includes\Plugins. If not, you should try to contact IR to get the plugin somehow.

Inform where and how to connect, setting connection mode, username, password and timeout, fetch the file and run it. I have built a small test stub with SUF 8.0 before writing this, to make sure it really works. It does:

http://www.mindquake.com.br/files/ams/SNAG-080805-00.png

Ulrich