Johan:
I'm having trouble using distutils with the bdist_wininst option. I've been able to create a COM server and package it in a .DLL, but I can't create an "installer" as a .exe My goal is to create a .exe that can be run on a client machine that does NOT have the standard Python environment, and this .exe would install all the modules?/.dll's/.exe's that are necessary for the COM server to run on the client machine.
That is not the role of bdist_wininst. bdist_wininst is designed to create an installer for a python package, not a stand-alone executable created using Python. What you want is the py2exe tool (http://www.py2exe.org/) to create an executable, then a generic installer tool, such as NSIS, Inno or an MSI based tool to actually install the tool on the end-user's PC. py2exe has its own mailing list - see the link above. Cheers, Mark