Sorry - I misunderstood the degree of control over the code you had. Surely though, if *somebody* is able to change the installer (and is likely to in the future), could some communication not happen between the two of you? If you wrote a patch for *their* code to read *your* datafile, would it be accepted? (Make it seem like it was their idea, but you're prepared to do all the work - always works for me {g}).

Sorry too to suggest a 'social engineering' solution, but short of (as was suggested by skx) parsing the file, it's looking like your best hope :)

Cheers,
Ben.