http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=11&qp
customb=0&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=149&qpnp=11
^-- Source of my data in this message...

That is something that has been bugging me too while reading this
discussion.  So my random thoughts on this topic of OS compatibility...

The cryptic error originally reported by OP isn't good.  We only support
Windows XP SP3+ as well, but if the user double-clicks the bootstrapper /
self-extracting EXE, they need to get a messaging saying they need XP - not
some cryptic error that might turn a user away from our application.
Unfortunately, with the way Visual C++ has been dumping support for older
versions of Windows, it looks like we would need to retain an older Visual
C++ compiler (or find a competing compiler) for the sole purpose of making
our own custom bootstrapper that shows a reasonable error.  What a pain!
Would be nice if WiX prevented this piece of overhead...

>From that link, I would guess that Windows 2000 usage must be close to zero
(lumped into the 2.51% "Other" category).  I'm less worried about that.  But
there's still significant XP usage, and dumping support for pre-SP2 versions
of XP is disturbing.  How can the bootstrapper request the user to install
SP3 if the bootstrapper itself requires SP2/SP3?

>From what I have read, the situation gets much worse with VS11 since it
drops XP support completely.  This is a problem, because apparently XP still
has 46% of the market.  I know many of our customers still use it.  We can't
drop support for it.  VS11 is out of touch with reality in this respect.  If
bootstrappers and/or custom actions start requiring Vista+, we'd have to
avoid the newer versions of WiX.  We'll also have to avoid VS11 ourselves
for the time being.  The improvements in VS11 might not justify dropping
support for a lot of our customers, if it turns out not to be realistic to
ask them to upgrade.  And the concerns I already outlined about
bootstrappers not failing gracefully apply doubly-so here - even if XP drops
to, say, 10% of the market and we decide to drop support, there's still
enough out there that we need the bootstrapper to kindly request Vista+. 

It would be nice if XP suffered a precipitous drop in market share this
year, but I doubt it.  Hopefully it will go away soon.  I suspect it will
still be common for another 2 years until companies are forced to move away
from it when MS finally kills support (or suffer the security liability from
an unpatched/unsupported OS).  Some people/companies tend to avoid change
until their lack of planning forces them into it - and maybe MS dropping
support will push them over the edge to get Win7/8.  By then, VS12 would be
coming down the pipeline, and companies like us would still be stuck on
VS2010 or older due to XP compatibility concerns if we decide not to drop
support for XP just yet.  (XP is the energizer bunny or something... it
keeps going and going.  I can't remember another consumer OS version that
has had such a long life cycle!)

James

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Neil Sleightholm [mailto:n...@x2systems.com]
> Sent: Monday, April 30, 2012 15:57
> To: General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset.
> Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Bundle fails on WIN2K machine ".exe is not a
valid
> Win32 application"
> 
> I agree with dropping support for Win2k but what is a shame is that
running
> the exe doesn't display a more useful error message. I don't suppose there
is
> anything that can be done to change this?
> 
> Neil 


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