From my experience with application virtualization: there is no easy way to do this. What you are seeing is precisely what you want to achieve with application virtualization: not contaminating t...
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From my experience with application virtualization: there is no easy way to do this. What you are seeing is precisely what you want to achieve with application virtualization: not contaminating the system with application files such that the application is easier to maintain. Hence, it is logical that system applications can't see the virtualized application, because it is not "really installed" in one form or the other. That being said, your specific Word/Visio problem is as follows: as far as I have understood, Word and Visio communicate through eachother using COM(+) and its derivates such as OLEv2. In order to let "the system application recognize the virtual application", you would need to link the virtualized COM objects of Visio to the system (for a physically installed application, this basically comes down to creating a bunch of not-to-user-friendly registry keys). That's not possible because the system cannot look inside the ThinApp'ed application and say "hey, I see you have some COM objects stored there". Therefore, what you need to do is make sure that Word can see the COM registrations of Visio and Visio those of Word. You can only achieve this by running both applications inside the same virtual environment. That can be done in two ways: - either create a new ThinApp package that contains both Word (or the entire Office suite) and Visio - use linked applications to merge the Visio virtual environment with the Word virtual environment. It's possible that there is another approach to this problem (yet I don't immediatelly see one), so I'll glady hear what other people can suggest. Hope that helps! Tim