I personally preffer Opera storing it's profile data under it's own program folder, instead of in both '%appdata%\Opera\' and '%userprofile\Local Settings\Application Data\Opera\'.

However, only the Opera msi installer features a switch for enabling that during a silent install and i preffer to use the classic installer, as it's smaller, faster and as i'm not really a big fan of msi installers in general(they leave a copy of the installer into '%windir%\Installer\', and they copy the installer into %temp% first, before they unpack it there, and since 'msiexec.exe' still is loaded into memory for a long time after the install has ended...)

The unattended solution i then preffer, is to use 'munge.exe' from the Win2K Resource Kit, to replace the line "Multi User=1" into "Multi User=0" in '%programfiles%\Opera\operadef6.ini' after Opera has been installed.

Then when a new Opera version is released, then it's just a matter of replacing the old installer with the new one and remake the ISO, but if we instead had simply overwritten 'operadef6.ini' with a pre-modified one, then a new pre-modified one would be needed upon each new Opera update, as the Opera installer always overwrites 'operadef6.ini' with a new version...

You'll need 'munge.exe' and a file named 'replace.ini' with the following content :

Then it's just a matter of :

Here is the first bit of my RunOnceEx.cmd which installs Opera :

I then have an Opera folder in '\$OEM$\RunOnceEx\' which includes the Opera classic installer, the munge.exe tool with it's replace.ini file, the flash player plugin(NPSWF32.dll), a reg-file with the reg-entries Opera sets upon second startup, when selecting 'OK' to make it the default browser(settings.reg), and then finally a subfolder named 'profile' which stores my Opera settings i.e. the 'profile' and 'mail' folders...

I use 'xcopy' instead of 'copy', because it by default removes the read-only attributes, which is convenient when copying from a CD on Win2k systems, as then an extra 'attrib' command isn't needed afterwards.

I personally preffer to not have a progress-window shown during the RunOnceEx install stage and just have the apps installed completely silent, so i then dosen't add any "description" fields in the RunOnceEx.cmd code and then the progress window isn't shown...

settings.reg :

To ditch the extra replace.ini file, then i'm now gone over to using minised.exe instead of munge.exe...

minised is a sed implementation which is about 5 times faster and 70% smaller than the normal sed implementation(GNU sed), so that's why i'm using that version...

Here's the link to the win32 port of minised : http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/minised.htm

Then it's just a matter of :

(The '/y' switch of 'move' isn't needed during overwrites when run from a batchfile...)

And the first part of my RunOnceEx.cmd which installs Opera :

(I use 'cmd /c' in front of minised, since else redirection to another file isn't possible...)

Edit : I have now changed to using gsar instead of minised, since gsar supports in-file replacements, is a little smaller, and is implemented with a variation of the extremely fast Boyer-Moore search algorithm...

Then it's just a matter of :


And the first part of my RunOnceEx.cmd which installs Opera :