windows installer - DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS=1 disables all shortcuts

Question

We have an application to be run on startup that allows many installed files to be changed after installation. We are trying to turn off the self-healing mode by setting the DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS=1 property in Orca. However, no shortcuts are being created when this property is set. All the information I've seen indicates that we should be able to create "non-advertised" shortcuts with DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS=1 set. Any ideas?

I have verified that the shortcuts are created correctly if DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS is left unchanged.

Answer 1

If you're creating a Setup and Deployment project in Visual Studio 2008, there's a very slick trick to make your shortcuts NON-advertised:

Add a textboxes panel in the UI editor. Make all the textboxes invisible. Make one of the properties 'DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS' instead of EDITAx. Make the value '1'. Your shortcuts will be non-advertised.

I'd like to give credit for this to whomever I stole it from, but I can't seem to find the original link.