Desktop Integration
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Thinstalled applications can interact with other applications installed on the desktop. The various ways applications typically interact the other components on the desktop are discussed below.

Cut & Paste
1. Pasting from System installed app to Thinstalled Application. This scenario has no limitations, the virtual application can receive any standard clipboard formats (text, graphics, html, etc), as well the virtual application can receive OLE objects.  
 
2. Pasting from Thinstalled application to System Application. In this scenario, the system application can receive any standard clipboard format, and OLE objects will automatically be converted to standard the closest clipboard.  
 
Printers
Thinstalled applications have full normal access to any printer installed on the PC where it is running. There is no difference in printing ability for Thinstalled applications and system installed applications. Printer drivers themselves cannot be virtualized using Thinstall and must be installed normally on the PC.  

Drivers
Thinstalled applications have full normal access to any device driver installed on the PC where it is running. There is no difference in access to installed device drivers for Thinstalled applications and system installed applications. If an application requires a device driver, this must be installed separately from the Thinstall package. In some cases the application may function correctly but in a limited fashion without an associated driver, for example Adobe Acrobat installs a printer driver which allows applications system-wide to render PDF files through their print mechanism. In that scenario, Adobe Acrobat (the application) can be used to load, edit, and save PDF files without installation, but other applications will obviously not see a new printer driver unless it is actually installed.  
 
Access to local disk, removable disk, network shares

When creating a new project structure, Thinstall will automatically configure isolation modes for directories and registry subtrees. The isolation modes control which directories the application can read and write on the local PC. Though the configuration can be easily modified, the default options work well. The default options are:  
 
Fixed disk (i.e. c:\): The user can write to their Desktop and My Documents folder, other modifications made by the application will go into the user+app sandbox (located by default under Application Data). It is a simple configuration change to allow the user/application to write to any location on the PC.  
 
Removable Disk: By default, the user can read or write to any location on a removable disk assuming they have access rights to do so.  
 
Network mapped drives :By default, the user can read or write to any location on a network mapped disk assuming they have access rights to do so.  
 
UNC Network Paths: The user can read or write to any location on a removable disk assuming they have access rights to do so.  
 
 
Access to the system registry
By default, Thinstalled application can read the full system registry as permitted by access permissions except for specific parts of the registry are automatically configured to be isolated from the system during the package creation process to reduce conflicts between different versions of virtual applications and system installed applications. By default, all registry writes from Thinstalled applications will be saved in an isolated sandbox and the system remains unchanged. This can be configured  

Networking & Sockets
Thinstalled applications have full normal access to networking functionality, they can bind to local ports and make remote connections (assuming the user has access permissions to do these operations normally).  

Shared memory Named Pipes
Thinstalled applications can interact with other applications on the system using shared memory, named pipes, mutexs, and semaphores.  
Thinstall has the ability to isolate shared memory objects and synchronization objects so they are not visible to other applications, and other applications' objects are not visible to your Thinstalled application.  
 
COM, DCOM, and Out of process COM
Thinstalled applications can create COM controls both from the virtual environment and the system. If the system has a COM control installed as out-of-process COM, these controls will be executed as virtual processes when used by a Thinstalled application, enabling you to control modifications made by these applications. COM objects provided by virtualized applications will not be visible to other applications on the system unless the application is running in the same virtual environment. It is possible to execute system applications inside of virtual environments so they can access COM objects provided by virtual environments, for example a system installed application can access virtualized Office components by running the system application in the virtualized environment.  
 
Services
Thinstalled applications can start and execute system installed services as well as virtual services. By default system services will be executed in the virtual environment so that modifications made by that service will be controlled by the virtual environment.  

Filetype Associations
Thinstalled applications can execute system installed application via file type association. File type association can be added to the local PCs registry to point to Thinstalled EXE files on a per-user or per-machine basis.