On 7/18/2011 6:41 PM, Vinay Sajip wrote: 
Yes, but the launcher installer is beta software, and it's not yet clear
exactly how the launcher will be packaged with Python 3.3. Clearly if
packaged as an automatic installation with Python, it will use Python
defaults.

Sure, and that's why I'm trying it out now, to provide feedback.  But because I couldn't tell from assoc and ftype commands that it had done anything, I was a bit surprised by the behaviors I did encounter when I encountered them.  So now I've learned about the limits of ftype and assoc, sadly.  And they only work for setting things in HLM if you "Run as administrator", by the way.

Wonder if there is a third party command line tool which augments them for reading/setting HCU Classes?  Will search.  I know there is a command line registry tool somewhere, but specifying the paths correctly would be onerous.

Would be nice if the default of Py 2.x or 3.x were an install question, perhaps.  I know that only affects scripts without #! lines, but it would be nice to limit the required creation of those to the smaller class of preexisting scripts on a particular installation.

Note that ALLUSERS was introduced precisely because Microsoft didn't think
things through initially with sufficient care, and there's no way to get
consistent behaviour across XP and Vista/Windows 7. It's possible to force
ALLUSERS=1 in the .msi, but this means that non-admin users can't try the
launcher. Unfortunately AFAICT, there's no obvious solution which "just
works", though if someone were to point out a solution it could certainly be
tried.

Could be, with .msi and/or .cab installers.  I have no knowledge of them, except that when I first needed to use an installer to package things, I read a bit about them, and determined that they are too complex for my brain.  I found NSIS, still complex, but it is much friendlier to my brain, but it seems to handle this case correctly, giving the installer creator the option of asking for or demanding elevation, and exposing the answer to the rest of the logic of the installer, so it can do different things for those cases if it desires.