I have developed a COM Add-In for Exceland am using a VS2005 Setup & Deployment project to build its MSI file.The resulting MSI file works fine for both single-user and entire-machine installations, installing the required registry entries to let Excel know how to load the AddIn.

However, the MSI file does not work in "advertise" mode. When I launch Excel after advertising the Add-In, Excel does notlaunch the Windows Installer to complete the installation. The cause of this problemappears to be that the crucial registry keyin HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Office/Excel/Addins (which references the ProgID of my Addin)is not being installed as part of the advertise execution sequence.

How can I robustly modify the advertise sequence generated by VS2005 to cause it to install this registry entry when it is advertising the Add-In? I have tried using Orca to manually add AllocateRegistrySpace and WriteRegistryValue steps into the advertise-execute sequence, but this does cause this registry entries to get added. Reading Phil Wilson's book "The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer" indicates that these registry items need to be marked "advertise," so maybe that is my problem, but I cannot figure out how tomark them. Any suggestions?

Any help would be appreciated!

I thought I should close the book on this matter. After opening a support incident with Microsoft on this, I learned a lot, but the bottom line is that you cannot advertise a COM Addinas a means of installing it on a managed desktop. There's just no way to get the required registry entries in place that would trigger the "repair" operation to complete the installations. So, I have abandoned using the advertise feature as a means of installing COM Addins on managed desktops.