After reading through hundreds of threads on the internet and seeing the same words over and over again "It can't be done", I have come up with a solution to make Plus! portable (yes this is for Windows Live Messenger).
I am a college student aged 17 and me and my friends decided that we were bored of the same old portable windows live 8.5, we wanted Plus!, not only for fun but also for its great feature of being able to hide messenger and your conversation windows. Anyone wanting to know how feel free to private message me or add me on msn, danni_is_my_girl_4eva@hotmail.co.uk and I'll give you a helping hand to do it yourself.

Anybody using Thinstall for this process is wasting their time as it simply does not work. Messenger needs to access files for plus to work alongside it, messenger finds the location of these files through the registry and if you thinstall everything into one little package the location (drive letter) cannot be changed, and if are wanting this to be portable the drive letter of your storage device is constantly changing rendering the registry settings you have saved in your package useless.

I'm sorry, but nobody serious on these forums is ever going to add you to their contact list. If you truly want to share the information you have, post it here so that others may benefit.

In which case it will have to wait till tomorrow as I am very tierd, in the mea time if anybody does wish to private message me asking for assistace they are more than welcome.

yes, share the information, that what these forums are for.

Or at least the final product

Right, I said I would reply so here it is. Although I have been able to make Plus! portable please note this project is still in its early stages and therefore as with any software in the early stages there are certain conditions in which the program will not function as expected. In the case of this it is completely portable apart from when being used on a system with a LUA (Limited User Account), this is because the loader needs to create subkeys under the HKLM registry key but the permissions of a LUA do not allow you to do this. This has been found out due to tests I have carried out on various systems today. I am going to continue working on this in order to try and correct this issue and also atempt to load everything into a single file however cannot promise anything on this. I will upload the package later on in the shortly and post the link making all work I have done so far publically available. Also if anyone knows of a way I could change the files so plus loads from the HKCU registry key instead of HKLM it would be most helpful and probably save me a lot of time.

A portable program doesn't use the registry at all...how is this a portable version if it's loading keys from the registry?

Thinstall - and other way to make it but its a lil wack to do that when u can just download and install it its not like its a 200mb+ file so yea

I have a .Reg file saved containing all the registry keys and values that Plus! needs and a .INI to load the main program. As the drive letter is always changing I have the registry values set to find the Plus! files in a specific folder on the drive letter that the program was launched, for instance if your portable drive was plugged into one computer using the drive letter F: and you lauched the program it makes sure your registry settings are there first, if not it loads them into the registry for you, the settings loaded under HKLM (normal circumstance), due to the settings in the registry it says Plus! is now installed so it reads the values in the registry to find out where its files are stored, in this case F:\Windows Live with Plus!\Application. If you to move to a computer and your drive letter is H: it would do the exact same again only the filepath would be H:\Windows Live with Plus!\Application.

Ah -

quote:

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Originally posted by dan1570
come up with a solution

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No it is not fully built yet as it does have the problem on the subkeys not being able to be loaded into HKLM on a LUA however as I said I have tested it on multiple systems and it does work as long as the access privilages are not set to read only. I have teasted this by using on the computer I used to put everything together with multiple user accounts, another computer I own which has had both messenger and plus installed before then uninstalled, one which has been totally formatted and had XP completely re-installed and the computers at my college. It has no issues other than where the Plus! part does not load on LUA although messenger still does. I am going to take my laptop into college today in order to try and get a little further with making it completely portable.

Use a virtual machine to do testing instead of having to format over and over and over.

I no longer need to format, I just formatted an old unused system that I had, all that happens with it is it boots up and i run what I have, It's not connected to the internet so nothing else can get on it. It has a pure registry. But then again if I'm only testing what I've already built so I don't need to worry about whats on there as long as I dont install messenger or Plus! because it isn't like I'm packing things up with thinstall as I've already said that does not work for Plus! because the Plus! registry values need to know where the files are located and as they are always changing you can't the values an exact location, also you would need to tell the values that the files are inside the thinstalled package.

and..???? what happend with the plus portable????

Many years ago I got flamed for calling BS on this one and I believe mine and a whole lot of others posts were deleted for being so rude.

aha