Does anyone know how to remove the Activation screen that shows up when you first run a runtime application?

I talking about this screen:

(IMG:https://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1p9pNXqKaETaSvvz1FKzV6nxU1LfNrxkcrdGjpEcmXoxDkd12Uv9-3JokRc2-vkns9HOGiLsdbyWq5KQ28F-QE-g/activate.png)

The above appears ONLY one time, fresh install...

Albert D. Kallal (Access MVP)
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
kallal@msn.com

I would imagine Office stores a flag in a registry setting somewhere so I suppose that if you could identify that setting, then maybe your setup package could be made to set the recommended setting automatically in the registry.

Not sure though -- I develop in-house applications and so far have never needed to create a setup package.

Mike

The general approach I use is to remove the display of the Eula, and in fact I also remove the finish and ok prompts. IN fact, my runtime install will just "start".

(I wrap the runtime install in a Inno script, but that not relevant here).

I might as well share the steps to "remove" the prompts, nags, the Eula.

It is rather easy, and the steps are part of my question anyway:

If you extract the runtime like this:
AccessRuntime.exe /extract:c:\a2010rt

So, the above will expand out the whole runtime install to a dir (in this example c:\a2010rt)

You then simply in this root dir add xml file called

Config.xml



That is it.

The above results in a silent install. In fact you can display ZERO everything including hiding the progress bar by changing in above the

Display Level="basic" can be changed to "none".

However, I actually like the progress bar.

So with the above, a simple execute of the setup.exe in above dir will starts the runtime install, it finishes. And does so WITHOUT ANY nag prompts or the user having to hit next.

I also set macro security low so no nag prompts occur when you launch any file.

I don't even thus has to setup trusted locations. I use this :



However, one might want to add some trusted locations, but with above you don't need to.

Anyway, all of the above works, all of the above is not the issue.

The issue is that Office needs to be ACTIVATED ONCE and this is even the case with the run time.

According to the office install documentation, if you want to do a silent install and you are utilizing volume licensing, then you can force a activation to remove this screen.

The documentation says this this should work:



Note that I HAVE the above in the above config file.

In fact, I have no doubt it works. However in theory, the access runtime is an install of office, and it ALSO needs to activate the one time, but it NOT a volume license.

This might be a registry edit. I will post back here. I am also open to the idea that this is not a simple registry edit problem, but I simply don't know and hoping somone where does!

Albert D. Kallal (Access MVP)
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
kallal@msn.com

Try importing this registry information (remember to leave a blank footer line in the .reg file if you choose to deploy it that way):

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\General]
"ShownFirstRunOptin"=dword:00000001
"FirstRunTime"=dword:0155cde9

Hope this helps.