As I promised at the distutils Birds-Of-a-Feather session at Pycon, I filed a defect on sourceforge with the title above, #935091 FYI for those of you who (like me) produce a Python install package using the distutils bdist_winst command, and you rely on a post-install script to create shortcuts, etc. - If the user installed Python using the non-admin option, i.e. on the 3rd screen of the Python 2.3.3 install program, "Select Components", the user clicked the Advanced Options button and then "Non-Admin install"... then afterwards every time that user installs a package created with bdist_wininst, the post-install script will not be run. How rare of a problem is this? I don't know, but in certain situations i.e. on Windows XP the user installing Python may not have admin privileges on that machine and may be required to do a non-admin install. I detailed the cause and a solution in the defect report. Doesn't look terribly hard to fix.