Doug, Now I'll do technical hair splitting, but it's not trivial. What you say, "You need to install those programs," is frequently simply not true, and that's more the case for a number of older Windows programs that were never "installed" in the full meaning of that term in the first place.
Installation on any Windows system requires the involvement of changes to the registry if one is using the term "install" in the way Microsoft has used it. You can still see this dichotomy in NVDA itself: there is an installed version, which involves changes to the registry (and sometimes running components as services that can be started before any single user logs in - e.g., screen readers that operate on the log in screen) and a portable version which makes none. Someone else pointed out earlier that they put the installed and portable versions of NVDA on their machine in case an upgrade makes it impossible to start the installed version they still have the portable one, though resident on their hard drive rather than a USB drive, available as backup. So long as the system boots into Windows a portable/stand alone program can generally run whether a number of installed programs can or not. I've been doing simple copying of Microsoft Photo Editor for decades now because it can be run as a stand alone program with no installation required. Based on what Doug has described it seems more likely than not that this was a collection of stand alone programs that did not require installation. Of course, if any were not, then what you've said stands for that select group. I just can't see how he could have copied stuff off an XP machine to an external drive and trigger those programs in the way he describes if they were not "portable"/stand alone programs as opposed to installed ones. Brian
