Altering setup.exe to embed customized icon

I have had quite a few requests to have a customer’s icon embedded in their setup program – and not use the default InstallShield one.  In the past I have poked around trying to see if there was an “Undocumented” method to do it and just simply gave up after spending a fruitless hour or so.

This time, I was going to try again – it should not be so ridiciously hard! 

Damn I’m good!  

After searching the forums, one post gave me a glimmer of hope – but not the method I wanted to employ.  The poster suggested that you take the final setup.exe and open in a Resource Editor and look at the Icon resource and there make your changes.  Well this means you need to alter the setup each time you generated an output file – that wastes my time, plus the setup.exe might be digitally signed – not a good solution.  But the germ of an idea was to alter the bootstrap setup.exe.

After searching, performing various test builds, I finally found a solution that works! 

1.  Navigate to the directory “c:\Program Files\InstallShield\2009\Redist\Language Independent\i386″
2. Locate the two bootstrap files “setupPreReq.exe” and “setupPreReqW.exe”.  Make a copy of them to preserve in case you have problems.
3. Open each in a Resource Editor and look at the Icon resource.  In my method, I used Visual Studio 2005 and opend a file, selected the icons section, and  added a new Icon resource that a customer supplied (a 32 bit .ico file), which became Icon 101 – I had to then delete #100 (the InstallShield default one) and renamed my new Icon from 101 to be 100.  I then saved the modified SetupPreReq.Exe and made the same change to the other one.  Forgive the improper use of technical terms – I don’t program at all, I am relatively new to the VS IDE!
4. Rebuild the application media.  Now the new setup will display the customize icon.  This works for each and every build!

Now I modified these two files for a project that has quite a few setup prerequisites – hence the ones that worked were named appropriately “setupPreReq.exe” and “setupPreReqW.exe”.  There were two other bootstrap setup’s, a “Setup.exe” and “SetupW.exe” but they did not work for my needs – but may be used if you don’t have setup prerequisites.  You may need to modify them as well.

For my needs, I will archive the original ones and use to create new customized ones for each customer.

Hope this helps!

Charles

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