Silent Installation of Microsoft MapPoint 2009 -- without changing browser settings

I had the pleasure of working with a friend of mine on performing silent installations of Microsoft MapPoint 2009. Out of the box, MapPoint's installer prompts the user for several settings, and by default has checked to change the home page and default search provider to Live/Bing Search as well as to install the Live Search toolbar. While you can get it to perform a silent installation without too much trouble and omit the toolbar as part of this, it still changes the browser settings during the installation, unless you perform the following procedure we discovered...

1) Create an administrative installation
Insert/explode your MapPoint DVD/iso and get a command prompt open to that location. Run:

Setup.exe /a

This will prompt you for a location in which to place the administrative/server installation.

2) Edit Setup.ini to turn off Live Toolbar installation
Working now in the server installation folder, edit Setup.ini in its root and change the following setting from 1 to 0:

[LIVETOOLBAR]
INCLUDE_LIVETOOLBAR=0

3) Edit data.msi to disable browser settings changes
There are no settings we could find exposed in the setup.ini to turn off taking over the browser settings. To disable this behavior, we edited data.msi (at .\mappoint\MSMap\data.msi in the admin installation folder), which is one of the MSI files called by MapPoint setup. Editing the MSI requires a tool called Orca that is part of the Windows SDK (we used version 6.0a). After installing the Windows SDK, I found Orca's installation MSI located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin\Orca.Msi. First, double-click this MSI to install Orca, then run the tool.

In Orca then, open data.msi from the admin installation folder. This shows you the series of tables and components within the MSI with their values used. There are several components you need to change under the tables listed below. You are editing the Condition field. HINT: sort the tables on condition and all of these will be grouped together.

• Component > MP_NA_IE_Homepage: SETLIVEHOMEPAGE<>"0" AND NOT Installed
• InstallExecuteSequence > SetLiveSearchAsIE6SearchEngine: SETLIVESEARCHSERVICE<>"0" AND IEBUILDVERSION<70000 AND NOT Installed
  
• InstallExecuteSequence > ResetDefaultSearchProvider: SETLIVESEARCHSERVICE<>"0" AND IEBUILDVERSION>70000 AND (LIVESEARCHSTATE=0 OR LIVESEARCHSTATE=1) AND NOT Installed
• InstallExecuteSequence > InstallAndSetLiveSearchProviderAsIE7Default: SETLIVESEARCHSERVICE<>"0" AND IEBUILDVERSION>70000 AND LIVESEARCHSTATE=0 AND NOT Installed
• InstallExecuteSequence > SetLiveSearchInstallAndSetAsDefaultGuid: SETLIVESEARCHSERVICE<>"0" AND IEBUILDVERSION>70000 AND LIVESEARCHSTATE=0 AND NOT Installed
• InstallExecuteSequence > SetLiveSearchProviderAsIE7Default: SETLIVESEARCHSERVICE<>"0" AND IEBUILDVERSION>70000 AND LIVESEARCHSTATE=1 AND NOT Installed
• InstallExecuteSequence > SetLiveSearchSetAsDefaultGuid: SETLIVESEARCHSERVICE<>"0" AND IEBUILDVERSION>70000 AND LIVESEARCHSTATE=1 AND NOT Installed
• InstallExecuteSequence > GetLiveSearchProviderState: SETLIVESEARCHSERVICE<>"0" AND IEBUILDVERSION>70000 AND NOT Installed
  

Finally, edit the Value field of the Property table to put those zeroes into the stored settings:

• INSTALLLIVETOOLBAR: 0
• SETLIVEHOMEPAGE: 0
• SETLIVESEARCHSERVICE: 0

The INSTALLLIVETOOLBAR setting may not need to be tweaked as it does seem to respond to the Setup.ini setting, but we turned it off for good measure.

Once you are done editing the values, save the MSI as data.msi and replace the one in the MapPoint admin installation folder.

4) Perform a silent installation

With your shiny new modified administrative installer, get a command prompt open and run:

Setup.exe /quiet

You will see msiexec.exe running in Task Manager but there will be no visible prompts. Once those terminate, MapPoint 2009 is installed, and it should have left your browser settings alone.

Enjoy!