Hi, guys, I run a little English school in Korea and I've written some software to allow students send homework files to my website, to allow parents to track essay scores, etc.

I've now tried 2 attempts at deployment, with 90% success rate-- and on those 90% the prog works thrillingly well. However I really need to get it up to 100%. I'm going crazy. If I can't get things working soon, I'm going to have to go back to pen and paper, and killing about 1000 trees a year. :-(

So far I've:
1) Made a setup project. That worked great for 90%, but about 10% couldn't run the installer, and some functions using "temp" and "program files" directories didn't work.
-So I cleaned up all routines to avoid any temp files in possibly-protected folders, and tried:

2) A standalone prog. The students should run this from my website. Of course, some cannot-- so I've told them how to save to the desktop first and then run the file from there. This method works on my wife's computer-- she can't run direct, but CAN run it from the desktop.

Again, 10% failure rate.

I'd imagine there are 3 possible issues: 1) insufficient permissions; 2) no .NET 2.0 (gasp) installed, or 3) need vcredist to be installed first.

I've re-written a lot of code to avoid the first problem. Can anyone tell me 1) what I can do to reduce extra installers like vcredist, and/or 2) What a sensible person with more experience would do in my situation?


Please help me, I'm really pulling my hair out here.