I'm currently writing (it is nearly finished) a bdist_wininst command, which is modeled after Gordon's windows installer. This command will create standalone executable exe-files for the win32 platform from the scripts which are specified in the setup script. The exe-file contains all the python modules needed by the script as well as the script itself in a zip-archive appended to a small stub program. The only other file needed is pythonxx.dll in the same directory as the exe-file itself. There is no need that the normal python distribution is installed on the system. Note: In case the script needs extension modules (*.dll or *.pyd files) these are needed as separate files as well, because they cannot be packed into the zip-archive. (Well, they could be packed, but they would have to be extracted before starting the script. This is in fact what Gordon's installer does.) Another note: There will be an option to use another stub, which contains the extensions distributed with python as separate pyd's: _sre, socket, zlib, ... So far, so good. Now for the problems: 1. I intend to distribute this command as a distutils extension. Unfortunately, it's a shame that we cannot use distutils to distribute itself (or additional commands). Distutils would install itself (in windows speak) in c:\Python20\distutils, whereas the stock distutils is located in c:\Python20\lib\distutils. Should there be a special hack in the setup script? 2. Should this command be integrated into distutils? Perhaps it is far too early for this question. 3. I would like to avoid the mistake I made in bdist_wininst, that the stub program's bytes are appended to the text of the bdist_wininst.py file, base64 encoded. So there would be one (or more) binary file winstub.exe somewhere on the file system. Where? distutils\commands\winstub.exe distutils\data\winstub.exe ? Thomas