Unknown publisher message

Question

Been lurking in the forums for a while - and I've found many
useful responses already. I've got a question that I've seen asked,
but never really answered, so I'll throw it out again.
We're publishing standalone EXE files from Captivate 2.0 for
our people to use. We're linking to them through a separate
customized html page (using EXE rather than html/swf for now
because we have video files embedded, and the EXE simplifies things
for now by creating one file rather than multiple files per movie -
several other reasons, but we've played with everything as
options). For now, the EXE files are located in the same folder as
the html page.
We briefly tried linking to the EXE files through hyperlinks
in a Word document. This triggered a single dialog box asking if
the user really wanted to open the file. We're changing this launch
page to an html page for several reasons. Unfortunately, when
linking directly to the EXE files from our new launch page, we get
two dialog boxes, which is pretty inconvenient. The two messages
are:
1) Do you want to run or save this file? (of course - that is
why we linked to it...) --> Run
2) The publisher could not be verified. Are you sure you want
to run this software? (Unknown publisher error) --> Run
First, is there any way to get around one or both of these
dialogs? It seems to me to be a Windows and/or browser security
issue, but I can't seem to get around the issue.
Second, if I can't get around both of these dialogs, has
anyone been able to use a digital certificate to prevent the
Unknown Publisher error? If so, any good resources on how to do
this?
Thanks in advance!
David
Update:
I think I found a decent solution for this. I am using
MenuBuilder, making relative links to the executable files (link to
the file on your computer, then delete everything but the filename
to make it relative to the MenuBuilder file's location), and then
exporting the Menu Builder as an EXE file. This seems to eliminate
all of the dialog boxes... It works like magic from my computer,
but I haven't yet deployed it, downloaded all the files from the
Web, and then tried it. We'll see...
Thanks for the suggestions.
David

Answer 1

Thank you for the responses. Yes, I agree that the html/swf
will be the better option for us down the road - this is more for a
short term phase of our project.
We aren't accessing the EXE files directly from the Web -
they are downloading them to their own computers, along with the
html file we've created to launch the files, and then accessing
them locally for classes. We've developed a custom LMS-type of
application to host the files - the next version of that app will
let them download everything in a packaged zipped format, so we'll
use the html/swf outputs at that time. It was just too confusing
for our users to use multiple file types (swf, html, flv video,
etc.), when the EXE made it simple to download and use.
For the present, however, I'm still trying to figure out the
best way to avoid our extra dialog boxes... I believe the fact that
they are downloading the files from the web may contribute to the
problem, but I get the same message when I access the local files
I've created through an html link.
Any other recommendations, or does anyone have any experience
digitally signing Flash .exe files so that we could be a trusted
publisher? I'm hoping that this could be a partial solution - we
should have a valid certificate, but I'm not sure if I can do it
with Captivate files.
Thanks,
David