Actually i downloaded Orca a couple of days ago and it seemed very similar to the Installshield developer tool.
In anycase this is what I have so far with Orca (based on your instruction)
I've attached a jpg with the tables of Control, ControlEvent, ControlCondition
and CustomAction. Actually its kinda neat that Orca isolates everything (a little annoying as well as you don't get a visual representation that Installshield gives you
).
I've only included the relevant table entries to reduce space so let me know if you feel you need more information.
Control - The entry in question is CustomerInformation - this is where you enter the serial number. In fact the variable name "SERIALNUMBER" is right there for everybody to see.
ControlCondition - Under CustomerInformation there are 2 entries, SerialNumberEdit and SerialNumberLabel, these don't look very interesting since I think they are just to edit the serial number. The Conditions "LicenseOK="1" looks interesting but I'm not sure where its set
ControlEvent - Under CustomerInformation again, the Next has a DoAction which points to a LicenseCheck with condition 1. Changing the condition to "0" gives me the following error "The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2803"
CustomAction - Here LicenseCheck is actually called _CheckLicense@4 and appears in TKCommonAct.
So this is pretty much where I was when I posted the message initially. Hopefully I've included more details that might be helpful.
I think it maybe easier to just post the msi file but I think it might invite the wrath of the admin.
Thanks for all of your help.
PS: I read the articale in wasm.ru, its pretty good except that the tool they suggest m_extract to extract any function calls in the msi file didn't work for me.