Thanks! Yes, it can be done with JAVA, but we weren't happy with the required UI compromises of a non-native app. I was sure we would be able to do this with F

Thanks! Yes, it can be done with JAVA, but we weren't happy with the required UI compromises of a non-native app. I was sure we would be able to do this with Flash or Silverlight, but A) of course I had reservations about both platforms and B) it turned out that it wasn't so easy to do. RE: time spent. Payments by Spreedly, which was a snap. Membership / access control came easily given our experience with previous products. The real time killer was the installation process and testing the app across WinXP, Vista, Win 7, 32 bit, 64 bit, etc. Sometimes I wonder if we're the only folks around doing Windows desktop apps! We used Microsoft's ClickOnce for the installation. The app silently auto-updates itself. You can click "About" to see what version you're running. It'll install the latest version if one exists. Getting this all to work right was a ton of work, but we wanted a really clean and simple install experience, and I think we achieved it. We had to deal with registration-free COM, created a bootstrapper that downloaded .NET Framework 3.5 if you're running Windows XP and happen not to have it, etc.