Smaller installer would be ideal, but I don't think GOG has the time for it. I guess we'll have to make do with what we have...

Not exclusively. On Win7x64 at least, it also runs the file integrity check twice, which takes ages if the file is huge. Granted, it can be skipped, but then why bother? There certainly shouldn't be any reason for doing it twice.

Of course, it only runs the file integrity check on the installer file itself (I think), so if they were to split it up, there wouldn't be any integrity check for the game data itself, but then there already isn't for games over 2GB.

As far as I know, the integrity check runs for all the data of the installer. The Witcher 2 installer has about 2 MB, yet the entire game is over 10 GB - and unless the integrity check of the 2MB file runs really, really, REALLY slowly, it has to check all the files.

Okay, then the only issue is to prevent the damned thing from running twice. It's quite annoying.

Well, they're just redoing all the installers now, so they probably DO have the time.

Right-click on the installer, choose "Run as admin".

If you just double-click on the installer, then it will check the file integrity, then ask for elevated permissions, and (once it gets those) check the file integrity again. I think the problem was that at this stage, the program doesn't remember that it checked the very same thing seconds before, but I'm not sure if I remember that correctly. In any case, running the installer as admin skips the first check.

As far as I know, that only happens for 1.x installers, and the integrity check for 2.x installers only happen (if enabled) on multipart installers (can be switched in the options for multipart). The 2.x installers do the permissions check directly at launch, and the integrity check only after clicking "install".

I recall the GOG installer integrity check is executed twice if you just double-click on it. But if you run it as administrator (through right-click), the integrity check is run only once. No idea why though.

The check runs once per applicaiton launch, and when asking for permissions after being launched, it's shut down and then run again (and thus doing the integrity check again) in order to run with higher permissions. Permissions for a process cannot be changed while the process is running.

Good to know about the "run as administrator" thing. I'll do that from now on. Thanks to all who answered that ;-)

I didn't notice that the 2.0 installers left out the secondary CRC check but I've stopped using the GOG downloader so I might as well let it slide, I don't mind the extra few seconds it takes but it was annoying when I installed Witcher 2 OTOH, the check alone took a few minutes and that was on a SSD.

And yes, running as admin is always a good idea especially with some of the older games here. Exception list for an AV is a good one too.

Bug in GOG's ISS code.

That's because of GOG's scripting.

Apparently they have it run the integrity check BEFORE elevating to admin privileges. Elevating to admin privileges means the program has to start again as an Admin, which runs the integrity check again. Annoying, yes.

If you right click the installer and select "Run As Admin", I think you'll see that only one integrity check occurs.

At least this was the case in the older installers, I'd have to check the newer ones and I'm not sure I have any new installs that run the integrity check.

EDIT: Bah, helps to read the thread all the way to the end. Sorry about giving you the answer yet again!

Multipart v2 installers still have it. Single part ones are digitally signed, if signature is ok, crc passed.