On Friday, December 5, 2014 4:56:42 AM UTC-7, bloatwaresucks wrote:
does anyone know of any resources for how to do this? for instance, win 95, 98 and me share probably 50% of the same files ......so, if you unpack the installs for each, group the common files, create a common.files.cab and change all references to them to point to the cab file. i also want to do this for firefox, mozilla, netscape or any program for that matter .........


any help would be appreciated

I'm thinking notepad and showdesktop.scf and that would be about it for files in common. But you'll need to use your web searching abilities on words such as
makecab
cabsdk

in combination with mdgx for the more relevant forum hits. Best of luck, since generating a list of common files alone is a task far larger than I care to think of. Especially when the end result is the same as I've already got. So it seems pointless to me, but you'll learn a few things and hopefully have fun.