Der schöne Günther

Use a profiler to find out what takes time and fix those parts 😎

It is what happens when the application that called ShellExecute did not provide a HWND of a foreground window. What is the value of your hndCaller ? Maybe you passed something like Application.Handle? Compare to GetForegroundWindow - Is your value the same?

About backporting: They did some of it around the time of XE8 / 10.0 Seattle, but not much after that, as far as I recall. https://community.embarcadero.com/article/technical-articles/16439-fall-2016-xe8-and-10-seattle-updates Here is an example of a pretty serious bug in System.Generics.Collections that never got backported. Thread includes comments from Marco Cantu why it didn't get backported. [RSP-13196] TQueue<TBytes> doesn't add elements - Embarcadero Technologies But I honestly cannot see anywhere that something like that was ever promised or sold. Of course it would be nice, but I can't really blame them, we also don't do backports in our software 😏

Is it just "your machine" or also others (virtual machines / Windows Sandbox)?

Be sure to supply your foreground window's handle to ShellExecuteEx. Source: Sertac Akyuz, StackOverflow.com

I'd have expected your method to return a Boolean for indication whether something has been found, and the out parameter can be used (your "IsValid"). An unsuccessful search isn't that out of the ordinary, so an exception is not appropriate. I also don't see that the first is an anti-pattern. Loop control with break and continue is perfectly fine. Did I miss something?

Evaluation versions do not come with source code, and the Community Edition with "limited" RTL source code (whatever that means). Your understanding of "borrowing" however even seems even weirder.

Fixed that for you

Different VMs 😎

All Windows 11 menus look like this. I have no idea what they were thinking.

Just a side note: For classic setups, I always untick "Start application" because those installers usually run with elevated permissions and will then also start the application elevated.

I don't have installers, but I think there's nothing wrong with that. It's not like you have to introduce your program, the user has already decided to install. The welcome page they use for their example makes no sense, because it provides absolutely no information. Same like "Setup has now finished" you sometimes see. By the way: Compare with this totally stripped down MSIX install experience on Windows:

Although the multi-platform approach never appealed to me, it still sounds terribly interesting. Do you have a reading recommendation (a presentation video is fine too) that explains their general approach?

I would absolutely agree unless @Mike Torrettinni also used a new feature as a motivation to drastically refactor parts that now needed bugfixing.

You can make a fancy looking TListView and fill it yourself.