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Inno Setup is an excellent free installer for Windows programs. It's scripting language is Pascal. http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php/

We use it at my place of work and I find it a lot easier to understand than InnoSetup. Plus it is free to download. One major limitation is that it does not support Windows Installer, instead you get a "classic" setup.exe.
Link: http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php

Actually I had the understanding that a lot of installer makers force you to have an EULA,

So why not use an open source installer? On Windows Inno Setup is very good; it doesn't force you to do this. (R offers the GPL in an information screen, with instructions saying "Please read", and "When you are ready to continue, click Next". I think that's about the right level: you want users to be aware of the GPL, but they don't need to accept it to do an installation.)

Despite arguing (with tongue in cheek) that a click-through is a good idea, in the latest release of R I removed the requirement. The license is still displayed, but there's no requirement to "agree" to it to continue with installation.

For people who are handling the installers for other projects: this was a one line change to our Inno Setup script, from

LicenseFile=${SRCDIR}\\COPYING

to

InfoBeforeFile=${SRCDIR}\\COPYING

For windows, I use py2exe and have a custom script that makes an innosetup install file. If you are interested, I can dig up this script for you (I think it should actually be a distutils setup, that would be nice) however, they are trivial to make.

For OSX I use BundleBuilder which generates mac bundles and is really, really nice especially since OSX comes with python pre-installed. I even use this script to create non-python bundles.

For linux I use PyInstalelr and tarballs :) There is really no good consistent linux installer, but I have had some success with PyInstaller.

Use Inno!

You can't just give yourself local administrator privilege to install and then take it away
"Run as..." can be accessed using an alternate click to impersonate any user when running any application. I have it on by default, so I can't tell which key combo; it's probably SHIFT + Right Click. Granted, some applications won't run because they think they're admin all the time and can do whatever they want, since they were installed as such. This is again an application issue.

so if you have an xp machine with more than one user, you choice is to not let those users use basic applications like Palm Desktop (it's a documented requirement, so it's 'not a bug' [yeah, right]) and cd/dvd burning software, or give everyone local administrator privilege -- which rather defeats the purpose of having a local administrator privilege
A solution is to find out which files your application requires access to and provide file-by-file access to users who need to run the program. You would do this for data files as well, so I don't see how this is any different. The complexity comes in when figuring out which files to "unlock". using a tool like filemon from http://www.sysinternals.com/ can help in that regard.
Nero as another example provides a tool to allow users without administrative privileges access to the DVD Burner. Their application is the problem, so they provided the solution. It's not up to MS to do this for them.

local administrators can delete or modify any locally stored file

You could theoretically make an account group with administrative-style privileges, and be able to lock this entire group out from folders. In my case, I have a laptop connected to a corporate LAN. noone logged in from that lan (including network admins!) can access primary shares on my drive. However, I've given read-only access to non-network systems so I can get stuff I need from any test computer (which are never logged on to the network).

In summary, you should think again about being admin yourself, since you don't understand the basic principles of administration. These same techniques (with variations of course) equally apply to any other OS. Unfortunately MS makes it look like it's easier than it really is.

Am I the only one that considers this piece of software the worst implemented software of Microsoft ?

I am yet to understand WHY anybody (excluding Microsoft) ever uses it, when there are free and open-source alternatives.

Just use Inno Setup instead.

The main difference with Linux/*BSD and other OSS software is that _all_ user contributions such as coding, graphical work, documentation, etc goes back to the community so that _anyone_ can use it. With MS, any work you do for them is just working for free since MS will keep all rights to the work and just resell it. If I am going to spend my time to help others for free, I want to help a community and not a corporation. I get paid for my work by a corporation.

Look at these two open source projects from MS so far. They are both very outdated and not very useful. VC++ is not the MS development platform of the week. It is now .Net. Why release VC++ stuff and not some .Net stuff under a real FreeSoftware license? How useful is that WIC installer? There are tons of good installer out there including commercial and free such as Inno Setup.

If MS wants to win the trust of the OSS community, they will need to put out something more significant and not some old unimportant code.

At the end of the day, MS is a closed/proprietary company. They are not going to do anything significant within the Free/OSS communities. The most I would ever expect from MS is Open-but-not-Free software such as Java. You can look at the code, but you cannot do anything with it. That type of code doesn't build a community of contributors.

There's also Inno Setup.

Don't forget InnoSetup (http://www.jrsoftware.org/). It's also free, and the source is available, and it's extrememly flexible and scriptable. Also, it doesn't advertise itself on the install window....

Have you heard of the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System or Inno Setup? I've made a few installers using Inno Setup and installed a few programs that use NSIS. They're both very powerful, easy to use, and free.

I know that it's not GPL, but that doesn't bother me because it's free, it's good and if I really really wanted to (I don't) I could look at the source code.

So, given that WiX (from the blog) looks somewhat complicated, what compelling reasons are there to move to it?

They should be using Inno Setup. Its free, easy to use with text-based configuration, supports all the way back to win95 with no big bloated windows-installer-installer to include.

I also used Inno setup with good results. It had some features that NSIS didn't and we switched to it. Very good so far. It is actively being developed.

InnoSetup on Windows is really good, although some people also swear by NSIS (NullSoft Installer (brought to you by the same people who did winamp.

So, before publishing any binaries, publish the tarball for a fairly universal installer (less<README, ./configure, make, make install). And, yes, add some screenshots, willya?