Software Deployment

Dear All:

Following several articles, web blogs, posts, forum entries and M$ documentation, I finally worked up the courage to attempt to deploy Office 2007 in my domain environment (Windows 2003/XP)

With that said, I attempted to generate a "single component" installer version for Outlook 2007 ONLY deployment... The idea was so that users can "get used to" Outlook 2007 and the Office 2007 look then I would "upgrade" them to the rest of the suite later on.

Prior to generating the MSP file, I grabbed the SP1 updater.exe from M$' MU site, and via the /extract option extracted the MSPs and placed them in the "\Updates" folder.

Then via the Off2K7 Enterprise (Volume License) CD content extracted on to my DFS share on the network I ran setup /admin and began fiddling with the ORK UI to generate the necessary MSP file.

For this example, I did the exact following:
********************************************************************************

SETUP
1) Install Location and Org. Name:
a) left path as is
b) Filled in our org. name

2) Addtl. network sources
a) entered full UNC path to Office 2007 CD content

3) Licensing and user interface
a) entered our VLK
b) checked EULA box
c) Set display level to None
d) Checked "Suppress modal" and "No cancel"

4) Remove Previous Installations
a) chose the 2nd radio button, and 1-by-1 via the "Details" button below set the "Remove" column for each entry to "Remove none" except Outlook 2007

FEATURES
2) Set Feature Installation States
a) In this tree, defined all as "Not Available" except Outlook, Shared Features and Tools
b) Set Shared Features and Tools to "1st time usage"

ADDITIONAL CONTENT
5) Configure shortcuts
a) Removed ALL except Outlook 2007

********************************************************************************

After this, I saved the MSP file, placed it in the network shares' root folder where setup.exe belonged then ran the following command-line on my system:

\\<DFSPATH>\<OFF2K7Share>\setup.exe /ADMINFILE Outlook2K7ONLY.MSP

after that I started watching via ProcessExplorer, and after about 7 minutes, my computer all of a sudden decided to reboot (surprise surprise! set the UI to 0 and whaddya get? ) After the reboot is what was "interesting"!!

Upon boot, the machine came to the logon window, I entered my creds, and moved on... it brought up my desktop and decided to freeze at that point! I waited for 20 minutes with no avail... so after that I forced a hard shutdown and booted into safe mode and forced a chkdsk on the entire disk. After the 5 stages of chkdsk completed I rebooted back into Normal and entered my creds...

At this stage, the ORK toolkit like screen popped-up and said "cannot use /ADMINFILE" then auto-dimissed itself and booted into my desktop. Upon inspection, it looks like all went well, as I have Outlook 2007 ONLY with the rest of the components as 2003. Outlook 2007 is SP1 version and the rest o the components are working happily alongside...

So... what is my question? Well:

a) Why did my computer freeze upon that forced reboot?
b) Is there a way to suppress the forced reboot?
c) What was that error msg all about? How can I get rid of that?
d) Looking at the XML file I generated via the MSP conversion tool ( http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179027.aspx ) I see entries for all the tools in there... Seeing as how I've been trying to make this a "single component install" is there a way to ensure these addtl. components DON'T get listed somehow?
e) regarding the MSPs for SP1, do we need ALL of them? Or for Outlook 2007, would just MAINWWsp1.msp suffice?

My suspicions:

a) I placed a bunch of MSP files that were extracted from the SP1 exe... I wonder if during the installation phase despite not needing it, it requested a file somehow then errored out perhaps?

b) Did I over-customize/utilize unnecessary fields in the ORK UI?

c) Do I need to create a seperate off2k7 share for the Outlook 2007 ONLY installer and have the SP1 update ONLY, along with Outlook2007ONLY msp file?


Any update/comment/insight is much appreciated as this is a now URGENT task that needs to be deployed/completed ASAP.