I just downloaded the Stronghold HD installer.
Looks nice and offers a new installation menu which I haven't seen yet from GOG.com.

However, if I want to install this game with the rest of my games (f:/games/GOG.com/..) it indicates that this is an incorrect path. I'm not allowed to have a . in directory names. The old installer didn't have this problem, and never gave me issues. Is this Stronghold related or is this a change in the GOG installer?

Anyone have an idea or ran into the same problem?

Some games don't install to paths that include periods and such, so they made it a rule for the new installers.

Not a bug, a feature.

Earlier, only some installers had that restriction because the game didn't like some characters (Jack Orlando, for example, doesn't like ".", so the path contained GOGcom rather than GOG.com). With the new installer, GOG apparently decided that instead of having different games install to different locations, they applied the character restriction to all installers.

Other restricted characters are "(" and ")", which poses a problem on 64-bit systems where 32-bit applications are by default installed to "C:\Program Files (x86)", so to get around that as well as the UAC permissions problem (applications are not allowed to save in their own folder unless run as administrator), GOG changed the default install path to "C:\GOG Games" from the earlier "C:\Program Files\GOG.com" or "C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com" (depending on whether you have a 32 or 64-bit system).

(Of course, we could always change the install path ourselves to get around the UAC problem - and we often had to with the earlier installer - but GOG's philosophy seems to be "everything should work by default", and I consider that a pretty sane one.)

And that's a good thing? Does this new installer again add crap to the Registry?

I don't know, it's good that the default path was changed though. Not only does it add the same stuff as before for each game (give or take a few values), it also adds a value for the last used install path so that you won't have to change it for the next game you install.

Oh, yey, wonderful! /s

Competing with GamersGate must be fun, I guess.