Background: Windows-xp mode of windows-7 does not give full windows instance (unlike VMWare virtual machine instance). There are restrictions on writing files to 'c:/Program Files' etc, which comes into effect when user is installing our software on windows-xp-mode of windows-7 (it works correctly when installation is done directly on real windows-xp machine)
Is it possible to detect if the program is running under "windows-xp" mode of "windows 7"?
The installer( generated using InstallAnywhere) is java program, but we can run normal executable(say c++ based one) to gather information about the machine.
Don't test for whether you are in Windows XP Mode specifically. Instead, test to see if you have problems writing to program files; if so, put in whatever workarounds you need to.
I suspect your problems aren't specifically caused by Windows XP mode, but rather by something that is coincidentally caused by XP mode, but might occur in other circumstances as well; doing a test for the specific problems you have would allow you to put in a workaround in all such situations.