I too would strongly encourage you to provide an alternative regarding the DX, VC, and .NET redistributables. Not only are these highly redundant and wasteful, in both space, bandwidth, and installation time, but they constantly enforce rewriting of system files and settings, even if it's non-substantive. It forces Windows to back up system settings and make restore points. While this is all unnoticed and irrelevant to the general consumer, it is bothersome to most experienced and power users. I would at least hope that Galaxy offers a single centralised point for installing redistributables, rather than downloading and installing them every single time. In comparison, Steam doesn't, but at least it always allows the user to delete the redistributable files before installation takes place. This can be especially helpful with some third-party redistributables like PhysX, where backward compatibility is... iffy.

Is that done before the current installation is checked or after? From what I recall, the redistributable installer checks what is currently installed, and only installs missing parts. Is the restore point created before checking, thus running the same redistributable twice creates 2 restore points, or before installing, thus running the same redistributable twice only creates one?

It should, but every time I check the system folder the files are overwritten. That would, or at least should, force the creation of a RP every time the redist is run, even if the RP is made after the check. I'm not sure MS itself is perfectly consistent on this, as I seem to recall that identical files weren't previously overwritten. Also, I think GOG may be forcing command-line parameters that enforce the overwrite.

The last such problem I had was with AvP, which recently added a whole DX_Jun2010 package to its files, and if Galaxy doesn't find them in the folder, it re-downloads, then reinstalls them. Posted this in the subforum feedback thread, but there's been no answer.

Removing crap and junk from the installers, and optimizing them can reduce their size quite a lot. Especially for older games, I remember being able to reduce some Ultima games down to about 5MBs and not like the 30+ MBs installers that they have today.
What's more stupid is that sometimes they include packages that games don't really need. The Witcher comes with VC 2005 for x64 systems which the game doesn't use at all. Pure bloat.

My idea of having all of these as a single installer for dependencies would deal with most of those problems...



edit: Doesn't need a new post so editing this last one:

Interesting, seems the password in GoG's installers have been figured out, see other thread here.