"Laurence Payne" wrote in message
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(Snipped non-relevant portion of posting)...

I discover that there ARE programs that claim to extract complete
program installations from one computer so they may be installed on
another. Does anyone have more information?

Laurence:
There are programs marketed that claim to transfer programs, configuration
settings, etc. from one computer to another, however, based upon my
experience with a number of these so-called "data migration" programs I've
found them to be virtually useless in transferring Windows applications from
one computer running
Win98/Me to another running the Windows XP OS. It's a crapshoot at best, and
the odds are stacked against you. Yes, they're fine if all you want to do is
transfer (copy) data files (for the most part) from one machine to another,
but that's about it. In nearly every case where the user wishes to transfer
programs and applications to the new computer, he will need the installation
media to install those programs on the new machine. And even then he can run
into problems when the application was specifically designed for a pre-XP OS
and no updates have been issued for XP. While there is a so-called
"compatibility mode" in XP, it's far from a certainty that it will work with
older programs.

Now if the source and destination computers are running the same OS and the
user has no problem in transferring the source's OS to the destination
computer, then it's a relatively simple matter of using a disk imaging
program, e.g., Ghost, to clone the contents of the source computer to the
destination one.

Art