Virtualization

I suggest going to http://www.thinstall.com/sales/trialeval.php and getting the 30 day evaluation. You should be able to Thinstall Office 2003 easily or at least I did. To cut down on the Thinstalled EXE size make sure to delete the MSOCache files.

I've run some Thinstalled apps and there was a considerable and silent delay when launching the applications, even small ones. These were exe's I downloaded and my workstation had no Thinstall client. Is this expected?

I should download the trial and play with it.. but god.. who has the time!

Thinstall packs the client into the header of the EXE so there is no resident client on the machine. This allows Thinstall to run multiple client versions on the same machine because the package will only use the client it was compiled with. What happens when you run a Thinstalled application is the client run time data is decompressed into memory until the application launches. It's streams sort of like SoftGrid but you don't define feature blocks like SoftGrid does. As you can see this solution's architecture is extremely portable and if you wanted to you could run your applications from a server share and have a logon script run Thinreg.exe to set up the shortcuts / file assocations.

But would you then have that delay everytime you launched the application on the machine?

I dunno, I didn't find the delay times horrible for ThinApp (Thinstall). The header is around 400k from what I remember.