Well, one thing that works great instead is Portable Keyboard Layout, which gives the function of Caps Lock by holding Shift + regular Caps Lock. It works great for me when I'm on internet chat rooms and it has been functioning perfect on both Vista and XP for me...should also work for 7. Dunno about a solution for Mac or Linux if that is what you use.

You wouldn't need to put the .reg file into an installer, even (Tomlu knows that of course - just in case someone's wondering). Just double-click the file and you'd be all set.

Remember that you can choose whether to make the .reg entry under LOCAL_MACHINE etc or CURRENT_USER. That's a handy difference. Just be aware that if you remap under CURRENT_USER I think that'll override anything in LOCAL_MACHINE when you're logged onto your user. Not quite sure, but I believe that to be the case.

I made the CapsLock move to RWin, myself. Found out that I never used RWin for anything at all. Another possibility is ScrollLock.

A few tips:

* You can create a hotkey (like Alt+F11) in your ahk script that toggles between Colemak and Qwerty to make it even easier to switch.
* You can autostart the ahk file automatically with your Windows logon (and have it autostart into Colemak or Qwerty as you see fit).
* You can create a USB drive that autostarts Colemak whenever you plug it into a Windows computer.

This should make it even easier to use Colemak for you.

PKL already does the hotkey switch thing and more. I have Win+F2 to switch layout, Win+F4 to suspend it and Ctrl-Win+F4 to kill PKL for instance.

Another fun functionality is that you can set an idle time limit before it automatically suspends and/or closes itself. Handy if you're on someone else's comp and tend to forget yourself. Like Tomlu suggests, on my wife's comp I have it autostarting (by a shortcut in the Startup folder on WinXP) and I wanted to have it start up suspended but it won't do that. Instead, I start up in a VirtualKey mode so the wife just gets normal QWERTY (but still the ability to fool around with the wonderful 'extend' keys should she feel brave) and by a simple press of Win+F2 I have my own Colemak ready!

The ultimate coolness for USB drives is using a U3 drive with your (or mine, heh) own customized startup partition. That runs Colemak, Cafe, a utility or two of my own making and geek.menu right off my USB stick on any autorun-enabled computer - and no U3 menu (I didn't like it). With a little fiddling, it could be customized so that it starts PKL differently according to which comp you're plugging into; but so far
haven't seen a real need to do that one.

I'll pester Farkas for the start-suspended functionality eventually, but I find my workaround to be completely acceptable. Meanwhile, I still can't shake the feeling that we ought to do something even more gritty, like intercepting each WM_KEYDOWN/UP and TranslateMessage(?) call from the System, redirecting to your own layout.dll and doing it all in C*. Ah well, in due time.

Making my own AHK file is what I started with and it got fatter and fatter but then suddenly PKL came and did all that so much much better. I don't just want a barebones Colemak, but the extended modifiers(!) and Unicode and whatnot. For a layout learner, PKL even has on-screen help images like that separate app I made a while ago.

As for the USB stick, I coded an AHK script that can find which drive letter the U3 drive has and run anything from it, then made that into my U3 'CD-ROM' partition instead of the usual U3 menu. Cafe is a file associator, but it's French which may be why the angloglots have had trouble adjusting to it. Mostly, it sits quietly in the background. I modded it a bit for my own purposes. You can have it associate file endings to your portable apps, either overriding the usual associations while it's running, or with an Alt-doubleclick if you want to do it more quietly. Great for editing documents in portable GVim for instance. If you're interested, give me a holler - or if you know another good associator.