Thinstall does not support 100% of applications and in some cases
application functionality may be degraded.
Before attempting a major application, it is often useful to check
Thintalk, our
online discussion forum to find out what experience others have had
with the same application. Most people only post to Thintalk when
they have problems, so if you don't find any information there is a
good chance the application is compatible with Thinstall. Thinstall
engineers address many compatibility issues with each new version,
so it's a good idea to try out the latest version if you run into
problems.
Some known limitations are listed below.
Device Drivers
Applications that require device drivers will not work when
packaged with Thinstall, unless those device drivers are natively
installed on the host PC. For this reason Antivirus, VPN clients,
personal firewalls, and disk/volume mounting-related utilities are
usually not good candidates to be Thinstalled. In addition,
applications that make their functionality available by inserting a
fake or real printer driver will lose such functionality when
Thinstalled.
Shell-integration
Some applications may have reduced functionality when Thinstalled
because they are no longer integrated with other applications on
the system. For example, applications that provide
shell-integration will lose this functionality.
Network visible DCOM services
Because Thinstall isolates COM and DCOM from the outside world,
applications that install network accessible DCOM services will
only be accessible on the local PC by other Thinstalled
applications running in the same sandbox. Thinstall supports
virtual DCOM and COM on the same PC; it is only network DCOM that
is affected.
Plugins and Addins
A different strategy for deplolying and using Plugins and Addins should be considered
since Thinstalled applications are isolated from other components
on the PC.
Global Hook DLLs Some applications use the API function
SetWindowsHookEx to inject a DLL into all processes on the host PC.
The injected DLL can intercept windows messages. This has been used
to steal or spy on keyboard and mouse input from other
applications. Thinstall will silently ignore requests made by
applications trying to install Global Hook dlls via
SetWindowsHookEx.