Tim,

> Once again, I really mean my offer to pay at least a part of 
> the cost of solving this. It's an important problem on the road to 
> spreading Squeak around the world. I'll throw in a squeak badge too!

I appreciate your offer and in fact we are actively working on the issue
ourselves. But having an installer still does not convince me that the
standard release distribution should be made up by twenty files when only
one is necessary. What you should get in a distribution is:
* Exactly one image file,
* Exactly one changes file,
* Exactly one sources file, and,
* Exactly one application (e.g., VM).
As I said I'm not opposed to people building highly modularized versions of
the VM but personally I don't consider them to be a good idea for the
general audience. In particular because it can lead to conflicts between
versions of plugins etc. I find it much better to simply tell people 'just
download the new VM' and for all the developer types on our list we can
still deliver updated plugins as external plugins. With all the disclaimers
that apply to it. BTW, another interesting quote (from Apple's introduction
to MacOS programming for Windows programmers at
http://developer.apple.com/macos/macoverview/):

WARNING: Shipping shared libraries is not encouraged. Mac users would prefer
to avoid the problems of DLL proliferation and version conflicts that face
many Windows users. We recommend shipping your application as a single
executable file. This makes it easy to install, and even allows users to
uninstall it without fear. You should only ship part of your code as a
shared library if you are delivering a large family of programs and the code
sharing represents a significant resource saving. 

  - Andreas