Windows XP: Integrating the Start Menu with a Portable Apps Tree

I had come up with a tentative list of portable applications to use in Windows XP, and had arranged the program folders for those apps in a tree structure under five main categories:  Multimedia, Online, Productivity, Tools, and Miscellany.  The question for me was, how do I combine that hierarchy with the similar hierarchy that I used for the shortcuts in my Windows XP Start Menu?

That question arose because, if the two weren't combined, I would have to search in two separate places for a program that I wanted to run.  First, I would search my Start Menu; and then, I would search my set of portable apps.  Portable apps were, almost by definition, not ordinarily installed on the computer, and therefore did not tend to create their own shortcuts in the Start Menu.  So unless I created shortcuts for my portable apps (and went through the hassle of keeping the shortcuts up to date with the actual portable apps that I was finding and using), I would have the set of shortcuts installed in the Start Menu by the installed programs, and then I would have the separate set of portable apps.

(There were alternatives.  I had recently seen a program that would let me list the programs that I wanted to run, regardless of where they might be.  But that program hadn't looked very appealing to me.  Even if I didn't absolutely have to have a single set of programs and shortcuts, that was what made sense to me at this point.)

The concept, here, was that I would wind up with a single hierarchical Start Menu that would contain all of the shortcuts to my installed programs, plus all of the program folders for my portable apps.  Obviously, I would not want this to reside on drive C, where all my portable apps would be wiped out whenever I reinstalled Windows.  I had already moved my Start Menu to drive D.

The simple answer, of course, was just do it -- just combine the two, there on drive D.  The result would be relatively portable, as long as the machines where I used it would all use the default locations for program installation.  That is, the portable apps would run wherever -- I would be clicking directly on their executables -- and the shortcuts to installed programs would run too, as long as they were always installed in the same places, so that the shortcuts on my Start Menu could find them.  On machines where some programs weren't installed, or weren't installed in the right places, the shortcuts would simply fail to run.

With this plan in mind, I organized the combined set of portable app program folders and shortcuts into a single tree.  To get the system to see them, I added this to the registry:

; Set locations for Start Menu and special folders
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders]
"Start Menu"="D:\\Installation\\Start Menu" 
"Programs"="D:\\Installation\\Start Menu\\Programs"
"Startup"="D:\\Installation\\Start Menu\\Programs\\Startup"
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders]
"Start Menu"="D:\\Installation\\Start Menu" 
"Programs"="D:\\Installation\\Start Menu\\Programs"
"Startup"="D:\\Installation\\Start Menu\\Programs\\Startup"
"Administrative Tools"="D:\\Installation\\Start Menu\\Programs\\Miscellany\\Administrative Tools" 

With that registry change, right-clicking on the Start button and choosing Explore would open a copy of Windows Explorer in the new Start Menu location on D.  It did not work that way with right-clicking Start > Explore All Users, though.  That just put me in the traditional Start Menu location (C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu).  I also found that additional program installations would put their Start Menu icons in the traditional location, and I would have to move them over to the new location by hand.  So apparently there were still some rough edges to smooth out.

Generally, though, I had the result I wanted.  I had a Start Menu that would not only be preserved on drive D when I reinstalled Windows, but would also be portable.  The programs on it would run on any machine, as long as either (a) they were genuinely portable apps (i.e., I was clicking on their executables) or (b) they were installed in the default locations on the computer where I was using this Start Menu.

Portable Applications in Windows XP: Which Ones to Use

I was assembling a list of preferred Windows XP applications.  Part of my goal was to replace installed apps with portable apps where possible.  Doing so had the advantages of getting back up and running much more quickly, whenever I would have to reinstall Windows; reducing system problems due to misbehaving applications; and having my favorite tools available, in my preferred configuration, when I had to use someone else's computer.  With the emergence of cloud computing, among other things, there had been a trend toward the virtualization of applications -- toward, that is, making apps less dependent upon a single piece of hardware.
So now I was engaged in a search for applications that would replace some of those I had traditionally installed on my Windows XP systems.  In my search, I found there were many sources of portable apps, including the categorized and somewhat ranked set in Andrew Lee's Portable Freeware Collection.  I used these sources to supplement and revise the set that I had started with, from PortableApps.com.  It seemed likely that I would continue to add preferred portable apps from various sources indefinitely.  In that sense, this post can only be a step along the way.  Even so, by this time I had accumulated enough applications to say a few things on the subject.

Microsoft Office and Alternatives 

Perhaps the single most important thing to say was that there were substitutes for Microsoft Office.  This was important because it permitted some freedom from dependence upon Microsoft programs.  I had already achieved some such freedom by switching to Ubuntu as my operating system and by running Windows XP within VMware virtual machines (VMs) on Ubuntu/WinXP dual-boot machines.  Through that step, I had multiple alternatives, whenever Microsoft Windows and/or Office failed me:  I could run Microsoft Office, or the freeware OpenOffice alternative, on either Windows or Ubuntu, either natively or virtually.  After that, there were very few times when I was substantially unable to get work done because of some software failure arising from Microsoft software.

The next step in that regard was to move away from treating either Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office as my primary operating or office system.  Where Windows was concerned, I had recently concluded that the computing world, and I, had not yet come up with a superior end-user alternative for PC-based (as distinct from e.g., Apple) systems.  There were far more, and far more useful, software applications available on Windows than on Ubuntu or other varieties of Linux.  But in the case of Office, it did increasingly appear that there were superior alternatives -- notably OpenOffice.  Then, too, I was among those keyboard-oriented users who were put off by the mouse-oriented ribbon that debuted in Office 2007.  In any event, I had had too many experiences with malfunctioning computer installations that desperately needed to be reinstalled, but that I was currently unable to reinstall because it would take too many hours to install and adjust Office and other heavyweight programs.

The current search for portable apps pushed me further in the direction of seeking an alternative to Microsoft Office.  As described in a separate post, people were struggling with the non-portability of Office 2003 and 2007.  Some pursued the option of downloading a presumably bootleg copy of Microsoft Office that was somehow converted into portable format.  That option (as noted in that other post) entailed considerable risk of viral infection, instability, and inflexibility.  Another option, which I did pursue, was to create my own portable version from my own copy of Office.  That, too, did not turn out well, primarily because the software capable of doing it properly was still too expensive.  Since I considered portability a real benefit, I was thus even more motivated to take seriously the OpenOffice alternative, which was freely available in Windows-based portable form.

Other Top Portable Apps 

Of course, there is more to the world than office productivity software.  A complete set of portable apps must depend on the needs of the individual user.  But it may be possible to select some, from among the estimated 150 categories displayed in the Portable Freeware Collection, from which a typical user might want to draw at least one portable app.

In preparing this list, I excluded many categories that did not interest me and/or in which I was not knowledgeable.  Among these excluded categories (to name a few) were those having to do with iPods, mp3 tags, games, and IM.  Also, in some instances, I took more than one example from a category (especially from categories with grab-bag names like "miscellaneous"), or took something other than the top-ranked program.  I have also used my own category headings, rather those supplied by the PFC website.  In short, this list is offered for purposes of interest, not precision.

Audio and Video

XMedia Recode
Audacity
IrfanView
Duplicate Music Files Finder
VirtualDub Portable
VLC
XBlender

Images, Graphics, Scanning

Photoscape
Dia
Softi FreeOCR

CD/DVD

ImgBurn
Virtual CDRom Control Panel
WinToFlash
Folder2Iso
BonkEnc

Files and Folders

Multi File Tool
7-Zip
TreeSize
Duplicate File Finder
ICE ECC
FreeCommander
FileCommander 
Undelete Plus
Bulk Rename Utility
Index Your Files
Unlocker

Backup and Synchronization

Toucan
FastCopy
ozSync

Downloading, FTP

Free Download Manager
FileZilla
WinHTTrack
uTorrent
VDownloader

Security & Privacy

PortableTor
Blowfish Advanced CS
ClamWin Portable
KeePass
CCleaner
Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder

Web Browsers

Firefox
Opera
FireTune
Opera Settings Import & Export Tool

PDF

Scan2PDF
Foxit Reader
Swift PDF

Registry Editing

Registry Commander
Regshot
RegFromApp
RegScanner

Remote Collaboration

ShowMyPC
TeamViewer

Bookmarks

TrayURL
AM-DeadLink

Fun & Entertainment

Raindrop
Sumotori Dreams
Wallpaper Randomizer

System Information

SIW 
PC Wizard 
Autoruns

Calendar & Time

Sunbird
TimeSync

General Reference

Convert
WeatherMate

HTML & Text Editing

KompoZer
HTML Portable Editor
Notepad++

Onscreen

ClipX
PNotes
SysExporter
Virtual Magnifying Glass

Phone & Email

Thunderbird
Skype

Math & Statistics

SpeedCrunch
R

Productivity & Desktop Layout

OpenOffice
WinTabber
VirtuaWin

Other

RamBooster
Stalled Printer Repair
EjectUSB
JkDefrag
AutoIt
Don't Sleep
PStart
Scribus
DSpeech

Portable Apps: OpenOffice as an Alternative to Microsoft Office

I was in the process of assembling a set of portable applications to run in Windows XP.  After some investigation and experimentation, I concluded that there was not presently a solid, affordable way of making a portable version of my copy of Microsoft Office 2003.  Since I did want office-type programs in my set of portable apps, I decided to look into alternatives to Office.

One alternative, of course, was to upgrade to a more recent version of Microsoft Office.  In the case of Office 2010, there were (as with Office 2003) various offers of free downloads of a portable version.  Some of these offers seemed to be related to an offer of a free trial that Microsoft had floated in 2009.  Others were apparently pirated versions, typically with little explanation of how the portability had been achieved.  I did not investigate the question of how well these copies would work.

Since acquiring Softricity, Microsoft itself had moved toward developing application virtualization for purposes of facilitating enterprise software installation.  Of course, that was a long way from setting up Office to run from a USB stick.  At this writing, Microsoft's concept of portability was oriented toward portable devices (e.g., phones, laptops).  Office 2010 did come with "portable device rights" in this sense.  There did seem to be one way to install Office 2010 on a USB drive with Microsoft's blessing, more or less:  obtain and install Office 2010 Starter Edition, and then install Starter Edition on a USB drive.  Starter Edition was adware; it replaced Microsoft Works; it consisted solely of limited versions of Word 2010 and Excel 2010; and it was officially available only a preloaded software on purchased computers.  There were ways to download it otherwise.

I had several reasons for not choosing the Microsoft option.  Those reasons included a need for some advanced features, a need for the ability to work with other kinds of files, especially via PowerPoint and Access, a desire to avoid the distraction of adware, and a preference for not being dependent upon Microsoft.  This was not to say that I would avoid using Office 2010 altogether.  I just wanted something that would work effectively on a USB drive.

Another alternative to Office 2010 was to move away from Microsoft altogether, to the extent possible.  There were several apparently significant alternatives to choose from.  The most popular still seemed to be OpenOffice.  The OpenOffice suite continued to have the advantage of being usable on multiple platforms -- so that, for instance, I could still get into a file, via Ubuntu Live CD (or dual boot, or virtual underlayer), even when Microsoft Windows or Office became completely nonfunctional.  OpenOffice also included programs that would work with those varieties of files just mentioned (i.e., Access databases, PowerPoint presentations).

One question, for me, was whether OpenOffice would display the relatively unrefined kind of interface and functionality that had recently prompted me, despite myself, to lean back toward using Windows rather than Ubuntu applications (even if I was doing so primarily in Windows running within a VMware virtual machine on Ubuntu).  If I had ever used OpenOffice in Windows, it had been a long time ago; in recent years I had only used it in Ubuntu, and very infrequently at that.  So now I took another look.  I did a brief trial run of OpenOffice Writer Portable for Windows, running from a hard drive, just to sample its look and feel.  Preliminarily, it looked and felt good -- noticeably better and more familiar than the Ubuntu version, though no doubt the two actually functioned pretty much the same.  On this basis, I decided to go ahead with some efforts toward using OOo (as they call it, short for OpenOffice.org) Writer more frequently.

Portability, another question, was a no-brainer.  The version that I had just sampled was part of the PortableApps.com standard suite.  The concept was that I would set up my full portable suite on the hard drive, so as to avoid having to install programs whenever I set up a new computer or virtual machine, and then I would copy that folder of portable apps to the USB flash drive when I needed to take those tools on the road -- with my laptop or to someone else's computer.  With this concept in mind, I returned to my effort to come up with a good set of portable applications for Windows XP.

Portabilizing Apps with Ceedo Personal

I was trying to create a portable version of Microsoft Office 2003.  That effort had led me to discover a positive review of Ceedo Personal and a favorable contrast against PortableApps.com by PC Magazine.  I decided to take advantage of a free trial to explore Ceedo.  This post described that exploration.

I was running this test on Windows XP SP3, running in a cloned virtual machine (VM) in VMware Workstation 7.1.  This VM was running a bit slow, but a VM generally would give me the option of wiping out everything and just making another clone, where I could start the experiment over from the beginning.

In the case of Ceedo, the VM did not seem to matter.  When I tried to install Ceedo in that VM, it insisted, instead, on being installed to a removable device.  That seemed unfortunate.  I had been working on developing a folder full of portable apps that I could use on my own computers and could also copy to a USB drive.  Running them from the hard drive was much faster than running them from the USB drive, so that's what I planned to do when working at home.  It now seemed that Ceedo was not going to cooperate with that plan.  But I hoped that a solution to this problem would emerge as we went along, so I went ahead with the installation on the USB drive.

During the installation process, I got a balloon pop-up telling me that the Ceedo Tray Icon Indicator would light up whenever I was using a program that was running under the Ceedo environment.  I guessed that this was a replacement for the previous approach that I had read about, where Ceedo would surround its own programs with an orange line.  Then Ceedo installed a toolbar at the top of the screen.  When installation was done, I had the option of taking a tour, which I did.  The gist of it was that Ceedo gave me that toolbar, which I hated, with its four buttons -- three of which were completely unnecessary, since they merely opened My Documents, Internet Explorer, and Outlook Express.  The fourth button opened something that looked like the Windows Start Menu, with Ceedo-specific choices (in addition to yet another set of My Documents, Internet Explorer, and Outlook Express).  There was no entry for Ceedo in the real Windows XP Start Menu, which made sense from a no-impact perspective; apparently the top toolbar was running entirely from the USB drive.  I used the top toolbar to open My Documents and no, the orange line had not been removed; it was there after all.  Since the only thing I needed from the top toolbar was the imitation start menu, and since I could get that by clicking on the Ceedo icon in the system tray (bottom right corner of the screen), I went into Ceedo's Options and instructed it to hide the toolbar when it was not in use.  I also changed some other settings.

I felt that Ceedo needed to give that imitation start menu a name.  For present purposes, I will call it the "Ceedo menu."  I went into that menu > Add Programs > Programs Directory.  It seemed to wish to open its own session of Internet Explorer, and apparently could not tolerate the fact that I already had Internet Explorer running.  It said, "iexplore.exe is already running.  Click 'OK' to open Ceedo's Internet Explorer and close the local Internet Explorer."  So I said OK.  Ceedo could perhaps instead give users the option of searching automatically for installed programs (or at least those having Start Menu entries) in the background; then, when users actually sought to open a file, they might have the option of doing so in those installed programs rather than mandatorily running them from the USB drive.  This would have avoided both the need to shut down the running program (Internet Explorer) and the slowness that I was experiencing when Ceedo did everything from the USB drive.  My present understanding was that speeding up Ceedo (if I could not run it from the desktop instead of the USB drive) would require buying a faster USB drive, such as the Kingston Vault (presently $40+).  In any case, the Ceedo menu did not stay onscreen during this process; it vanished as soon as I chose Programs Directory.  Programs Directory, itself, turned out to be just the Ceedo webpage listing the various freeware apps that you could apparently run from Ceedo.

I was more interested in seeing if Ceedo could portabilize my apps.  I experimented, first, with IrfanView.  To portabilize Irfanview, I went to the Ceedo menu > Add Programs > Argo Application Installer.  It offered to show me a list of programs supported by Argo, so I clicked on that option.  Nothing happened.  After playing around a bit, I found that it was trying to take me to a different list of applications than the one that I had just seen.  There weren't many items on it, and it didn't seem to contain any deep, dark secrets.  So apparently Ceedo was still in the process of trying to organize its website.

So anyway, back in Argo, I tried to point toward the IrfanView .exe file.  It was very slow in identifying the .exe files in My Computer.  It occurred to me that I wasn't sure whether it wanted the setup .exe or the installed, ready-to-run .exe.  I tried the IrfanView setup .exe.  That, in itself, was a bit perplexing, because there were two IrfanView setup .exe files -- the setup itself, and the plugins -- and I would want them both included in my IrfanView installation.  There wasn't an option, as there had seemed to be in JauntePE, to include materials that had been incorporated into a previous iteration of the portable app.  But anyway, on the next screen, Argo confirmed that I had guessed right:  it said, "The wizard will now launch the following setup file."  It gave me an option of installing in "reduced machine separation mode," which a webpage said would entail some permanent installation on the host PC in order to use that machine's resources.  Another page said, somewhat obscurely, that this "reduced separation mode" would enable the portable app to "interact" with apps on the host.  The idea seemed to be that you should choose this option only if you or the program actually needed that kind of interaction.

So I went ahead with the Argo process.  It gave me the IrfanView installation screen.  I went through the IrfanView installation process.  When that was finished, Argo was gone, and I had an IrfanView installation in the designated folder on the hard drive.  I realized then that maybe I should have designated a folder on the USB drive.  I couldn't tell if Argo had done anything in particular to make IrfanView portable, since IrfanView tends to be portable anyway.  I also couldn't tell what I should do to install the IrfanView plugins, other than (I guess) just run them through the Argo process and point to the same output directory.

So, OK, maybe IrfanView wasn't the best program to experiment with.  I tried again, this time with Microsoft Word 2003.  I started Argo, browsed to the Office 2003 installation executable file, and ran it.  After a while, I got this:

Microsoft Office 2003 Setup
Error 1719.  The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed.  This can occur if you are running Windows in safe mode, or if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed.

That was odd.  I had just installed and uninstalled Office 2003 in that same VM.  The installer had worked fine then.  But OK, I created another clone VM, in which there had been no prior Office 2003 installation, and booted it up.  This time around, I did something that perhaps I should have done last time:  I rebooted when I got the message that the hardware (i.e., the USB drive) had been recognized but might not work properly until I rebooted.  After I rebooted, I got a Ceedo Action Window that gave me the option of enabling Ceedo AutoDetect.  That, according to the Ceedo help file, was a "tiny" optional component, installed on the host, to detect whenever a Ceedo drive was connected.  I said yes, do this.  It took Ceedo a long time to load; and when the "Loading Ceedo" message did finally disappear, I was surprised to see that the Ceedo icon likewise disappeared from the system tray.  I went to the USB drive in Windows Explorer and restarted Ceedo manually from there, but it said, "Ceedo already running."  Yet it did start a new "Loading Ceedo" message anyway.  If Ceedo was running, where was it?

Eventually, I did get a Ceedo icon in the system tray, and when I clicked on it, I was able to go back into Argo and start the Office 2003 installation again.  I tried again to install Office 2003 and again got that Error 1719 error message.  This was occurring in a VM clone like those that I had been using repeatedly in recent days to test various programs.  To test it, I closed Ceedo, removed the USB drive from the system, and tried installing Office 2003 natively in that VM.  It ran without difficulty.

That concluded my test of Ceedo.  Moreover, since my investigation had not turned up any superior alternatives to Ceedo that would do the job, this concluded my search for tools that would give me an affordable, portable copy of Microsoft Office 2003.  So at this point I returned to the main project -- of developing a set of portable applications for Windows XP -- with the sense that I might need to consider alternatives to Office 2003.

Transitioning Away from Windows Toward Ubuntu: The Next Step

In September 2008, I reached a point of relative stasis in the development of my computer setup.  I was using two computers, each with its own monitor, but with a common mouse and keyboard via KVM switch.  Both computers were dual-boot setups, so that I could have gone into Windows or Ubuntu on either one; but I tended to just use one or the other.  Specifically, on one computer, I installed Ubuntu and then used VMware Workstation to run Windows XP in virtual machines (VMs).  On the other computer, I was almost always running Windows XP, rarely going into Ubuntu.

I had assumed, there at the end of summer 2008, that I would be revisiting this layout in summer 2009.  Generally, that didn't happen.  Instead, two years passed.  At this point in 2010, however, I found that there had been some developments, such that this system could evolve.

One development was that, sometime in the intervening two years, I set up a third desktop computer.  It was mostly a collection of hand-me-down parts, but it ran Windows XP well enough.  If I really needed to do something in XP, I probably could do it there.  Moreover, I had acquired a laptop, for a bargain price of around $350 -- plus another $250 or so that I didn't entirely expect to spend, when I went to the store, for an extended warranty, laptop sleeve, screen protector, wireless mouse, etc.  Such a deal!  Anyway, neither the laptop nor the bucket-shop computer were anything to write home about, but they would serve in a pinch.

Another development was that I had run into several systems problems on the primary Windows XP machine.  It still ran stably, but I was getting occasional flaky problems.  Probably there would have been a list of them, if I had taken a minute to list the ways in which the machine was not performing up to snuff.

Probably the most worrisome such problem was that I had reached a dead-end in my efforts to install Windows updates on that primary machine.  It just wouldn't install them.  I had revisited the problem repeatedly.  At this point, it would probably have been more effective to just reinstall WinXP from scratch on that machine.

That update situation had been persisting for a while.  It hadn't bothered me much.  Recently, though, something else had happened.  I had somehow started using McAfee antivirus software, and I had just discovered that McAfee had been piling up gigabytes of stuff in .bup files.  I was concerned that this feat would have been possible only by mixing in data files; therefore, I had begun an effort to compare against an old backup and figure out what, if anything, might have gone missing over the past several months or longer.  So that was the end of McAfee, for me, but it was also a wake-up call to take computer security more seriously.  That meant keeping updates installed, but perhaps it also meant it was time to continue my migration away from Windows.

For such reasons, I thought it might be time to consider running both of my primary computers under the same kind of Ubuntu - VMware - WinXP VM setup.  If I needed XP, I could still drop back into the dual-boot, or just use that hand-me-down computer.  If I needed Vista or Windows 7, I could use the laptop, which was presently running the one but which apparently qualified for a free upgrade to the other.

In addition to those developments on the Windows side, things had also been happening on the Ubuntu side of the equation.  First, the good things.  Ubuntu was looking good and running well.  I had learned a bit more about Wine.  Generally, I was continuing to become more familiar and comfortable with the world beyond Windows.  I still had occasional issues with VMware, but generally nothing lethal.  As an additional consideration, Oracle had created the impression that it might be positioning VirtualBox to compete effectively with VMware.  Even without that, it was still nice that I could leave a WinXP VM running in Ubuntu for a week without needing to reboot it, while that would just never work on the native WinXP machine.

At the same time, after these several years of experimenting with Ubuntu, I had to agree with someone who had said that Linux distributions still tended to be terribly unpolished in comparison with Windows.  Somewhat contrary to my expectations, I was not finding many instances in which Ubuntu programs were delivering superior functionality and reliability.  For instance, I had bought a copy of Beyond Compare, a file synchronization program.  (I subsequently realized that I probably could have gotten by with a freeware alternative, but whatever.)  There were Windows and Linux versions of Beyond Compare.  The Linux version did not seem to be very actively developed, and it was having problems that I wasn't having in the Windows version.  The same was true elsewhere.  I was still using IrfanView, which did not yet have a Linux version; I was still using CoolEdit 2000, because it had features that Audacity did not provide.  Generally, I was finding that Ubuntu was great as an operating system; I was finding it useful as an underlying layer, to handle tasks that WinXP couldn't handle (e.g., delete files that WinXP couldn't delete); I found that WinXP running in a VM on Ubuntu was more stable (although slower) than a native WinXP installation.  But at the point of application, for my purposes, Ubuntu wasn't a serious competitor against Windows XP.  And I was increasingly unwilling to invest the time to learn how to do everything in two or more different ways.

My conclusion, at this point, was that the best of both worlds called for running Windows XP within virtual machines (in VMware or otherwise) on an Ubuntu operating system base, on an Ubuntu/XP dual-boot computer.  I had already worked through many of the issues in this sort of setup, and could therefore hope to be efficient and preserve multiple troubleshooting options without too much of a time investment.  If Windows 7, Ubuntu, or some other operating system (OS) began to display capabilities that I badly needed, I would hopefully be able to incorporate those OSs into my setup, one computer at a time, without too much disruption overall.

Organizing Portable Applications in Windows XP

In a previous post, I have noted what I felt were several advantages of portable software, but have also mentioned one or two problems with my attempt to use the PortableApps.com framework.  This post describes my progress toward another approach to using portable applications in Windows XP.

For quite a few years, I had used drive D to hold portable applications.  These were programs, links, and other materials that I would not have to reinstall, if Windows itself needed to be reinstalled on drive C.  So now it was pretty easy to set up a folder called D:\Installation\Portable Apps.  Under that folder, I set up a subfolder called _Menu.  (With the beginning underscore, Windows Explorer would put it at the top of the list of folders.)  In _Menu, I arranged shortcuts to each of the programs I had brought together into the Portable Apps folder.

This approach had its own advantages and problems.  On the positive side, it could be much faster to run programs from the hard drive than from a USB drive.  So treating drive D as the authoritative source, to be backed up and copied from, made sense.  Then, if I took the USB drive off to some other location and made changes on it and/or on drive D, I would want synchronization software that would let me reconcile those two drives in their changed form.

On the negative side, this rigid file structure, which worked well enough on the hard drive, might not work so well with a USB drive.  Imagine copying a program from drive D to a USB drive that would be plugged into some other computer, where drive D would not be available.  The jump drive would take some other letter -- say, G.  At this point, all of my menu shortcuts to portable files stored somewhere on drive D would fail.  Worse, every reference to drive D within my portable programs would fail.  For instance, if the program kept its settings in D:\Installation\Portable Apps\CoolProgram\coolprogram.ini, it would now be unable to find those settings.  (Fortunately, portable programs usually seemed to refer to other files within the same folder, so this might not be too much of a problem.)

To avoid problems with references to drive D, I went looking for another approach.  In the Portable Freeware Collection (PFC) website, I found a list of portable program launchers, ranked in terms of popularity.  At the top of that list, I found a program called PStart.  Its webpage said, "Unlike Windows shortcuts, PStart uses relative paths, when installed as a portable application. If your USB key drive gets another drive letter when you insert it into another computer, your portable applications still can be started properly" -- as long as those applications were on the same drive as PStart.  This appeared to be an improvement on PortableApps.com, where there was some indication that relative addresses might not work for programs other than the .paf files you would get through PortableApps.com itself.

So I downloaded PStart and ran it.  It acted like a normal installer, with advice to close all other programs before continuing.  It seemed that it might not let me install it as a portable application.  I went to the PStart FAQs page for guidance.  It seemed to say I could just go ahead.  Sure enough, I came to a screen that gave me a choice between local and portable installation.  But the portable one was not seeing any portable drive -- because, of course, I had not plugged one in.  That is, it was not going to let me do a portable installation directly to D:\Installation\Portable Apps.  I plugged in a USB drive, backed up, and tried again.  But it was still just saying "other drive" -- that is, it was not recognizing the USB device.  So, OK, I canceled the installation and tried again.  This time, it found the USB drive.  I noticed that, now, it did offer me a Browse button, and that led to any drive on the system.  So perhaps I could have installed it directly to somewhere on D after all.  But it was OK; I went with the approach of putting it in the default location, which was the root of the USB stick.

When installation was done, I accepted the option of starting PStart now.  It gave me a little pop-up window that said, "Rightclick to add items."  I didn't want it to add items to the USB drive, so I killed it, went to the root of the USB drive in Windows Explorer, and moved PStart.exe (the only thing I found there) to D:\Installation\Portable Apps.  Then I double-clicked on it and it ran.  But now I noticed I had two PStart icons in my system tray, so I killed this newly started session, right-clicked on one of those tray icons and selected Exit, and then right-clicked on the other one to show the pop-up window again.

Since I had already accumulated a boatload of portable apps in D:\Installation\Portable Apps, I didn't want to right-click and add each of them manually.  I didn't find guidance on the webpage, but in the program itself, File > Search for Executables seemed to be just what the doctor ordered.  This placed a single top-level item in the Items tab, called simply D:\Installation\Portable Apps, with an indication that it had found 429 items.  I opened that item, dragged the corners of the little window to make it bigger and easier to read, and started down the list.  There were a lot of items to delete.  For example, in the case of 7-Zip, it found 7-Zip Portable, 7-Zip Console, 7-Zip File Manager, and 7-Zip GUI.  I had to decide which ones to delete, and then select and delete them one at a time.  Sometimes I had to try them out; sometimes I had to consult D:\Installation\Portable Apps to see which ones I would actually want to run.  In this way, I reduced the list to 102 programs.

Now there was the question of organizing them.  In my _Menu folder, I could create subfolders for various categories of programs -- web browsers, for example.  PStart's list of 102 programs was not the easiest thing to sort through and find what you were looking for.  I sent PStart's makers a question about that.  In the meantime, I planned to keep both organizing approaches.  I would use PStart for its dynamic ability to start a program regardless of the drive letter assigned to the USB drive; but I would use my menu and its submenus of shortcuts, when copying the Portable Apps folder to another hard drive, because I had long been running portable apps from the same place (i.e., D:\Installation) on my various virtual and native Windows installations.

Before long, I found that I was not using PStart very much.  One reason was that it was just more familiar to use the menu of shortcuts.  I wasn't doing very much work in situations where I actually needed a portable drive.  When I did need to run an app from the jump drive, I could just navigate to its folder and click directly on its .exe to run it.  I wanted portable apps primarily so that I could reduce the number of program complexities and reasons for a system crash in Windows XP.  I wasn't sure if portable apps would actually help in that, but that was the nature of the investigation in process.  So I was just using shortcuts to run my portable apps from their own menu, with the idea of adding that menu to my regular Start Menu at some point.

If I had tried to depend more heavily on PStart, it seemed that I would have had some problems.  First, it was not easy to keep its menu updated.  If I brought in a batch of a dozen new portable apps that I had just downloaded from some website, there didn't appear to be any way to detect just the newcomers.  If I ran PStart's regular "Scan for executables" menu option, I would get the list of 400+ executables again, and would have to go picking among them.  I didn't have that kind of time to devote to this.  In some future iteration, I hoped, the program would remember what it had found previously, and would present me only with the newcomers.

A second problem was that PStart did not provide a way to categorize shortcuts.  I was just stuck with this list of 102 programs.  The office software, video software, file utility software -- it was all just lumped in together.  The Edit > Add Folder option didn't mean that I could add a folder to the PStart file list; it meant that I could add a folder that I wanted to list along with all these applications.  If I knew I needed a video program, but couldn't remember its name or just wanted to see which ones I had available, I couldn't go to a subfolder entitled "Video," within the PStart panel, and choose the most suitable app from there; I'd have to just go down the list of 102 programs, one at a time.  Even then, I'd be limited to those whose names made sense.  If a killer new video program called itself XPQ, it just might not occur to me that this was what I was looking for.  I'd have to edit its name, in the list, to make sure I could recognize it -- thereby increasing the amount of reading I'd have to do when I went searching for a program.

Instead of PStart -- indeed, instead of a menu that I would have to maintain -- I decided to try something different.  It occurred to me that I could just arrange the portable app folders themselves in a menu structure.  So under my Multimedia top-level folder, I would have an Audio subfolder; and in there, I would put the actual program folders for each program that I thought of as being primarily audio-related.  I made a copy of my Portable Apps folder and experimented with this.  Along the way I noticed that I (or whoever I got the idea from) had been mistaken:  shortcuts did seem to keep track of their targets, even when they were copied to another drive -- at least as long as they were all copied together.

This hierarchical arrangement seemed to work pretty well, and I decided to make it my approach, at least for the time being.  The next question was how to integrate that hierarchy into my regular Start Menu, with its shortcuts to installed programs.

PortableApps in Windows XP

As of summer 2010, a portable application -- what I had been calling a "standalone" program -- was a program that did not have to be "registered" with Windows.  It might not exist on your computer at all until the moment when you would plug in a USB drive containing it, and then you could run it immediately from that drive without having to go through an installation process.  You would also thereby avoid the risk that this would be the straw that broke the camel's back -- the program that would cause Windows to crash.  Moreover, you could thus carry your toolbox around with you, and always have that particular program that you might need for some purpose.  You would also tend to be running lighter software, meaning that a netbook computer might find it easier to run.

Within the world of portable applications for Windows XP (or other operating systems), there was an actual PortableApps (PA) website.  The concept of this enterprise appeared to be that you begin by downloading and installing the PA platform, optionally with a suite of basic programs (e.g., Firefox, OpenOffice), and then you add other portable applications from their directory or elsewhere.

At about the time when I first started paying serious attention to PA, I was in the process of configuring a minimal WinXP virtual machine (VM), and wondered if this way of loading programs would help me to set up a faster and better-functioning VM.  To that end, I decided to err on the heavy side, by installing as many apps as possible on my USB drive.  I had a 4GB Kingston drive available, and if it looked promising I could always buy a larger one.  So, for now, it was a question of what I could get onto that 4GB drive.

I didn't want all of the programs that came with the PortableApps.com suites, so I just downloaded the basic platform, along with a bunch of individual apps.  I installed the basic platform in the root of the 4GB Kingston, following instructions.  It took about a minute.  Then, at the end of that installation process, I launched PA.  It seemed to disappear whenever I used the mouse or keyboard, and after each app installation was completed.  So I kept having to go back to re-run StartPortableApps.exe, there in the root of the USB drive.

To install the individual apps, I went into PA's Options > Install a New App and browsed to each of the .paf.exe (PortableApps format) applications that I had decided to install.  There wasn't a batch process option, so I had to sit there and wait through each of these installations, one by one.  I ran into a problem when I decided to delete one of them.  The problem had to do with administrative rights in Windows XP.  It took a couple of hours to sort out.

Some of these apps had multiple features.  I wasn't familiar with all of them.  It appeared likely that, as I did get to know them, others would become superfluous.  Also, many of these apps had their own additional instructions or informational webpages.  I combined them into a PDF and put a copy on the jump drive itself, for future reference.

The user could right-click on a particular app in PA to pull up a menu of options:  Run, Run as Administrator, Rename, Refresh, Hide, Show Hidden Icons, Favorite, Start Automatically, and Uninstall.  I used the last of those with Sumatra PDF, when I decided in favor of Foxit; but when I said to uninstall, I got an error message:  "Unable to uninstall %APPNAME%."  PA's instructions  said I could just use Windows Explorer to delete the item, followed by the Options > Refresh App Icons menu option in PA.

These difficulties were overshadowed by a much larger problem.  At one point, I took the jump drive out of my computer and tried running it in another computer.  That computer had a different kind of antivirus software than mine.  I think it may have been McAfee.  Whatever it was, it decided that the PortableApps platform was malware, and promptly deleted it.  Presto!  The sleek interface was gone.  The antivirus software also wiped out a couple of individual apps within the PortableApps set.

That pretty much ended my use of PortableApps.com.  Instead, I switched to a different portable applications setup, one that was not quite as slick but was much more robust.

Ubuntu 10.04: IrfanView and Other Portable Apps via Wine

According to Tom Wickline, the process for installing IrfanView 4.23 on Ubuntu 8.04 was just a matter of installing winetricks and MFC42.dll and then installing IrfanView.  I wasn't sure how to do each of those steps, and I wasn't using quite the same setup as he was.  This post traces through my own installation process.

I was using Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).  I had just downloaded IrfanView 4.27, and thought I would try to install that latest & greatest version.  Also, unlike Tom's system, mine was not "a clean configuration directory, with no other applications or games installed."  According to Ubuntu's System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager, I was using Wine 1.2.

My first hurdle was to figure out how to install MFC42.dll.  A WineHQ webpage said that I could get MFC42.dll from Microsoft or via winetricks.  They said I might already have gotten winetricks installed during my Wine installation, but they also said that I could run it even if it wasn't installed; I would just have had to type "sh winetricks" instead of just "winetricks" to run it.  I checked Synaptic.  Sure enough, there it was.  The purpose of winetricks seemed to be to add Windows-friendly support files so that Wine would run Windows programs.  That sounded about right.  The winetricks webpage listed MFC42.dll among the files that it was prepared to help me with.  I went ahead and typed "winetricks mfc42.dll."  That ran and appeared to change some settings.  I went into the wine subdirectory under my Ubuntu user folder:  File System/home/ray/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32.  Tyler Style had said that it needed to be there, but it wasn't.  Amusingly, he had posted that a few months earlier in response to my previous attempt, a year earlier, to get IrfanView running in Ubuntu.  Well, I thought, maybe MFC42.dll had known what it was doing when it installed itself; maybe Tyler was wrong as to the location where it would be found.  The other thing he said that I needed to do was to go into Applications > Wine > Configure Wine > Libraries tab and register MFC42.dll there.  I typed mfc42.dll into the "New override for library" box, at that location, and clicked Add.  It seemed to accept it:  it listed "mfc42 (native, builtin) as an Existing override.  I clicked Apply > OK.

This was fine, for whatever it was worth, but it didn't add IrfanView to my program menu.  To install IrfanView, I had gathered somewhere that I needed to type "wine iview427_setup.exe" to install IrfanView.  I tried that.  It replied with this:

wine: cannot find L"C:\\windows\system32\\iview427_setup.exe"

That raised two questions, which may be summarized as "why not?" and "so what?"  I didn't know why the error message had put that L in front of the C, but whatever; I had since discovered that, in Windows, IrfanView would install as a standalone program, and had therefore moved it to a different partition where I kept all of my Windows standalones (so that I wouldn't have to reinstall them whenever I had to reinstall Windows, but could instead just copy the whole folder to drive D (or whatever) on the new computer.  In other words, I wondered whether I could skip the installation; I wondered whether Wine could run portable or standalone programs.  According to MoebusNet, it could, and one way to make it do that was to download and install PortableApps to the USB drive where you were going to keep your portable programs.  In my case, I wasn't going to keep them on a USB drive; I was going to keep them in a folder on my hard drive.  I wasn't sure how that would work, but I gave it a try.  I downloaded and ran the little 2MB PortableApps Platform.  They said it was self-contained -- PortableApps was, itself, portable -- so I wondered if I could install it on the folder on my hard drive where I kept my other portable programs.  After a brief search, I decided the best way to find out was just to try it.  So when it came time, in the installation process, to choose the install location for PortableApps, I named that folder as the destination.  When the installation finished, in Windows Explorer I copied my IrfanView portable folder to the PortableApps folder.  (I kept a copy in the original location so that it would be available outside of Portable Apps as well.  I thought I would probably prefer to run it that way from my WinXP boot.)  I deleted iv_uninstall.exe from this copy, since I didn't want the uninstaller to show up in PortableApps.  I created a shortcut to PortableAppsPlatform.exe and put that in my Start Menu.  I started up PortableAppsPlatform and, following instructions, clicked on its Options > Refresh App Icons.  I clicked on the IrfanView icon and, sure enough, IrfanView started up.

So now that I had acquired this lovely knowledge about PortableApps, it was time to get back to what MoebusNet had started telling me, about running portable apps in Ubuntu via Wine.  I typed this:

wine "/media/DATA/Standalones/PortableApps/PortableApps.com/PortableAppsPlatform.exe"

and that worked:  IrfanView started up.  So the concept seemed to be that any portable app that I would put into a folder on the same level as the PortableApps.com folder would show up when I ran that command.  So I could make a single PortableApps menu pick for Ubuntu, and it would lead, via PortableApps, to any portable application program that I would set up that way.  I set up a launcher for that wine command by highlighting, right-clicking, and copying it into the Ubuntu Applications menu:  right-click on Applications and choose Edit Menus > Applications > Accessories > New Item.  Name it PortableApps, paste the copied command into the Command box, and Comment it as "Launch portable Windows applications."

This was all wonderful.  But when I tried to play a .wav file in IrfanView, I was still getting the same error message from the previous year, the one that Tyler Style had tried to help me with.  The message read as follows:

IrfanView
Error:  Windows can't play this file!
Windows error text:  Invalid MCI device ID.  Use the ID returned when opening the MCI device..
You can try to install additional video/audio codecs from this site:
http://www.fourcc.org/indexcod.htm
or try the DirectShow option in 'Properties->Video'

The fourcc.org/indexcod.htm webpage seemed to offer video but not audio codecs.  Some Ubuntu documentation pointed me toward the Ubuntu restricted extras repository.  I thought I had already set myself up for everything I could get from there, but the documentation was saying, "Installation only works completely and properly when done from the command-line Terminal. The entire package will not usually install completely from within a Package Manager."  So possibly Synaptic had not brought me all of the codecs I needed.  I killed IngrfanView and then, obeying the documentation, I typed this:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

but it said I already had the newest version.  I could have tried completely removing and reinstalling ubuntu-restricted-extras, but that sounded like it could lead to other difficulties.  Besides, another post made it sound like the codecs might actually be in Medibuntu, which I had also installed.

There were two other things to think about.  One was that I might just try a different audio player.  I posted a question on that.  The other was that I maybe I should take a shot at that actual error message.  What did "Invalid MCI device ID" mean?  Turns out I had posted a bug report on it the previous year.  I posted an update to that bug report.

Meanwhile, in response to the question about an alternative audio player, I got a suggestion to try an older version of IrfanView (namely, 3.98), or to try mpg123 if my reason for wanting IrfanView was to enable skipping to the next file in a folder with just one keystroke.  IrfanView 3.98 dated from 2005, so I would be missing out on some newer functionality.  It didn't seem to be available on the official IrfanView site, but I found numerous other locations for it.  It was a bit harder to find the plugins for version 3.98, but eventually I did.  I installed 3.98 and its plugins on a Windows XP machine and then moved the installed folder over to the Ubuntu machine.  I deleted the previous IrfanView folder from the PortableApps folder, and put this new IrfanView 3.98 folder into PortableApps in its place.  (This time, I didn't keep a copy outside of PortableApps, since I didn't plan to run 3.98 in WinXP.)  Once again, I deleted the Uninstall.exe file from this IrfanView 3.98 folder.  I went to Ubuntu's Applications > Accessories > PortableApps > Options > Refresh and then clicked on IrfanView.  It opened up.  I went to Help > About.  Sure enough, I was now running version 3.98.  To test it, I hit Print Screen.  This opened Ubuntu's Save Screenshot dialog.  I clicked Copy to Clipboard, moused to IrfanView, and hit Ctrl-V.  Sure enough, I had the screenshot in IrfanView.  I tried cropping it (left mouse click / drag / release, Ctrl-Y), set View > Display Options > Fit Images to Window, and, sure enough, IrfanView was functioning normally.  Cool!

To try IrfanView's audio functioning, I navigated to a folder containing several .wav files, double-clicked on the first one, and it played -- in Ubuntu's Totem Movie Player.  Oops.  I right-clicked on the .wav, but Ubuntu wasn't listed as a possibility for the program to play it in.  I went back to PortableApps and started IrfanView again.  I went into its Options > Properties -- but, of course, I had already set those.  So, a problem:  could I get Ubuntu to treat IrfanView as the default viewer or player for a filetype?  My first search didn't turn up much.  PortableApps had a live support chat, but no joy for me there, so I posted a question on it in a PortableApps forum.  Then, resuming my tinkering, I right-clicked on the .wav again and chose Open With > Other Application > Wine Windows Program Loader, but that gave me "Error:  There is no Windows program configured to open this type of file."  Well, I had definitely configured IrfanView to do so, but maybe Wine didn't agree.  I tried a search for that error message, and followed one particularly painful thread from that search.  Somewhere along the way, I got the idea to try Ubuntu's Applications > Wine > Configure Wine > Applications.  With Windows XP as the version of Windows specified at the bottom of the dialog, I clicked on Add Application and navigated to the folder where I had put PortableApps; and in there, I navigated to the IrfanView folder, selected i_view32.exe, and clicked Open > OK.  Now I went back to the original Ubuntu right-click on the .wav, selected Open With > Wine Windows Program Loader . . . and still got the same "no Windows program configured" error.

I had forgotten the option of installing IrfanView as an Ubuntu application via Wine.  Following my steps from a year earlier, I navigated to the IrfanView 3.98 folder and typed "wine i_view32.exe."  But no, that wasn't right; that just ran the portable version.  That command-line approach wasn't necessary anyway; I discovered that I must already somehow have set up Wine to run .exe files automatically, apparently following advice like that provided by a relevant Community Documentation page.  All a bit puzzling.  I continued playing and posting on it, trying to dig my way out.

Meanwhile, I experimented with mpg123.  Some time had passed, and I couldn't remember if I had already installed it, so I just typed "mpg123" at the Ubuntu command line.  This gave me an odd error message:

The program 'mpg123' is currently not installed.  You can install it by typing:  sudo apt-get install mpg321.

What was odd was that the installation line said mpg321, not mpg123.  I checked Synaptic.  It confirmed that I didn't have mpg123 installed yet, and it also showed me a program called mpg321 on the next line.  The description of the latter characterized it as an "mpg123 clone that doesn't use floating point."  Apparently someone at mpg123 decided that mpg321 was a superior alternative, and thus gave me that command line suggestion to use mpg321 instead.  Just to be sure, I did a search and got the impression that mpg123 began as nonfree software, so mpg321 was prepared as a free alternative and it just became more popular.  I installed both of them in Synaptic, but after playing around with them for a half-hour or more, I was still not getting playlists to work properly.

I found a page listing top Linux music players.  I looked at the webpages for several on that list, but none of the six or eight pages I looked at provided a simple explanation of how the players actually worked -- of whether, to cite an example, you could hit the 6 key on the numeric console at the right end of a standard keyboard to move on to the next file, as you could do in Winamp.  From that list, in the name of trying something rather than nothing, I installed Audacious.  It was a nice enough player, but it did not have the ability to delete a file that I was listening to, as IrfanView did.  It was also not as responsive:  IrfanView would stop immediately when I told it to, so that I could mark a file for resorting or other handling; Audacious would continue on for maybe a second or so, which is not much except when it results in the program's moving on to the next file, which was not the one that I wanted to delete, re-listen to, or otherwise handle.  I decided, once again, that what I wanted was undeniably IrfanView, until further notice.

By this time, Ringi had replied to my latest post in that thread.  It seemed that s/he was doing just fine with the latest version of IrfanView in Ubuntu.  Since there seemed to be no need for 3.98 after all, I deleted the IrfanView 3.98 folder from PortableApps and replaced it (again, without the uninstall.exe) with a copy of 4.27.  Ringi asked whether I had installed IrfanView's plugins, and that was a good question; I was not sure.  Actually, by now I wasn't even sure I had actually installed IrfanView via Wine; it wasn't appearing in Applications > Wine > Programs.  Returning to my notes at the start of this post, I decided that the PortableApps thing was a dead end, at least for purposes of getting IrfanView to run the way I wanted.

I went back, specifically, to the advice (above) that I needed to type "wine iview427_setup.exe" to install IrfanView.  In Terminal, I navigated to the original setup folder (i.e., not the unpacked, ready-to-run standalone folder) where I had stored iview427_setup.exe and irfanview_plugins_427_setup.exe.  I typed that  Wine command:  "wine iview427_setup.exe."  It said, "err:module:import_dll Library MFC42.DLL (which is needed by L"D:[path]\iview427_setup.exe") not found."  So, OK.  I had not correctly installed MFC42.DLL after all.  Following the Winetricks instructions, I typed "sh winetricks mfc42.dll."  I got an error:  "Can't open winetricks."  I verified, in Synaptic, that I did have cabextract installed.  Synaptic also confirmed that I had winetricks installed.  Nonetheless, following those instructions, I typed "wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks."  It ran.  I tried "sh winetricks mfc42.dll" again.  This time, it said, "Unknown arg mfc42.dll," followed by a list of the packages that it did have.  Oops:  just plain mfc42, not mfc42.dll.  I retried:  "sh winetricks mfc42."  It ran without error.  So, interesting:  it seemed that Synaptic (or whatever approach I had used previously) had not done the job of installing winetricks properly.  Now I got a dialog for "VCRedist Installation."  I okayed through that; something ran in Terminal; and it concluded with this statement:  "Install of mfc42 done.  Winetricks done."  Cool.  I had finished the mfc42 part.  Now back, once more, to "wine iview427_setup.exe."  This gave me the IrfanView Setup dialog.  I set it to install for all users in C:\Program Files\IrfanView\.  It completed, and IrfanView was up and running.  I killed it and typed "wine irfanview_plugins_427_setup.exe."  That ran OK, and now I had an IrfanView entry in Applications > Wine > Programs.  I started IrfanView and set its options, including naming it as the default handler for all audio files.

So IrfanView now seemed properly set up for sure.  In IrfanView, I did a File > Open.  It was listing only image files, but I changed it to show all files, and then tried to play one of the .wav files in that folder.  It gave me the "Error:  Windows can't play this file!" message again, same as before.  I killed IrfanView, double-clicked on a .wav file in Nautilus, and the file played -- in Totem!  It certainly appeared that I had installed IrfanView correctly -- at least once, if not multiple times -- and yet it was still not functioning properly for me in Ubuntu.  I returned to a Wine bug report that I had started to file a year earlier.  I didn't know how to file bug reports, but I gave it a whirl.  The concept seemed to be that you get a debug trace on the uncooperative program.  In this case, that seemed to call for going to the folder where I had installed portable IrfanView and running the following command:

WINEDEBUG=+relay,+seh,+tid wine i_view32.exe &> /tmp/output.txt

That opened IrfanView and waited while I repeated the steps I had taken:  open a .wav file, get a repeated error message, etc.  When I closed IrfanView, the output file was there.  But when I looked in it, it only contained repeated instances of this message:  "fixme:mciwave:MCIWAVE_DriverProc Unsupported yet command [2115]."  That last number changed, in each of the six repetitions of that message:  2115, 2114, 2132, 2114, 2132, 2132.  Maybe that was all it was supposed to say.  Whatever.  I attached the output.txt file to the bug report and sent it off.  Meanwhile, I posted a link to this note in the discussion thread, in case Ringi or someone else felt like reviewing it and possibly detecting what I had done wrong.