Quote: "I am thinking of making the project files open, but only for the other app owners, in order for them to include there apps if they want to. It would be nice if we could get all community apps in one download and have a clean UI to launch each tool."
Why not go one better and have a simple webpage that app owners can go onto. It would allow them to enter their application's name, upload an icon image and specify the default installation location (using things like
%PROGRAMFILES%, incase the user's C drive is actually D or E, etc..).
Then your app can check if the app exists at the given location and if it does, show it in the menu or whatever.
And just in-case someone installs a program to a different folder you can have it so the end-user can specify where they installed it if it's different.
Quote: "Minus the download manager, that is a bit beyond my abilities"
If you want help with that, let me know, it's actually relatively simple once you've learnt it
Quote: "1. When viewing TGC forum, recieve error "Function Expected", "Continue Running Scripts on This Page?", most likely due to cookies for tracking viewed threads.
a.Proposed fix, possibly switch to "WebKit" based broswer. (suggestions welcome)"
I have a potential solution to this if wanted
Quote: "In order to ensure the app will work on your PC, go ahead and install VB Express 2010 and make sure you do all windows updates afterwards. This way you will know for sure you have the dependencies on board, it will help eliminate some things out of the debugging process."
There's no need for that, all the user needs is the correct .Net Framework Redistributable that your application is made with.
So if you make your app for .Net Framework 2.0 then the end-user will need...
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=0856eacb-4362-4b0d-8edd-aab15c5e04f5&displaylang=en
... and so on, for the other framework versions.