Flash Drive Install
 

Can Limewire (or any other P2P app) be installed as a standalone app on a flash drive? This means it does not require registry entries or files copied to other directories in order to work.

Just one question how are you able to make a program work with out having any registry entries. How will the OS know it is there if there are no entries.

If an app is written to use common dll's, these are usually kept in some Windows system directory. If the app needs to create temp directories for whatever reason then this info is stored in the registry. Windows needs to know where everything is in order for the app to run. If an app does not require the use of common dll's and/or includes all of the required files within it's on program, then technically Windows doesn't need to know anything about the program. Double-click the exe file and it runs.

Check out http://portableapps.com/ for numerous apps that will run standalone.

Evidently you can I just did it on a 16MB flash drive the only problem I encountered was that LimeWire requires 15.8 MB to install so I had to install Java on the computer to make it work. I set up the save file on the flash and if the flash drive was larger it would work. But with the small drive I got a disk error message due to lack of space. Any way it will work if you have a large enough flash drive.

It may seem like it installed like a standalone app, but you simply told the install where to put the files. If you search the registry I'd bet you find reference to Limewire.

I searched the reg could not find LimeWire anywhere. But I did find a folder in C:/Windows/Prefetch