Why do so many programs have both a setup.exe and a setup.msi?

Question

I have always wondered about this. So many application setups have a zip file that you unzip, and in it are a bunch of files, among other things an exe and an msi. What is t

Answer 1

In the case where you have both exe and the msi the exe is just a loader for the msi. If you have an installation supporting multiple languages then the exe applies a language transform (mst) on the msi before installing.

You can consider the exe as a wrapper around the msi. The msi file may or may not be given separately. The reason why people give the msi file too is to facilitate a group policy installation (in a Windows Active Directory infrastructure) as you can only push down installations of msi files and not exes.