A decent solution I think would be to use the [include] options of the plugin.ini to point to a new version of your plugin, which would free up your plugin to allow another script to remove the old version when a new one exists. So you just update the one customplugini.ini that can even exist on your network (max does not hold on to this), and next time somebody starts max, they will have the newest version of the plugin.
Yes, I replace the original max file to be able to update max everytime somebody restarts max. All shortcuts still work and I pass the arguments through to the original max exe, so it’s not disruptive.
I’ve written a small blog article about it sometime ago : http://blog.subd.nl/2010/03/syncing-scriptsplugins/
It’s definitly not “the way”, but it’s certainly a way, it works fine here. Only the c# executable (or any executable) should be aware of what version of max and or what version of windows is running, as the new vista and win7 policies (when used) won’t allow you to write in program files. So my exe now saves all the plugins scripts in the user folder, and creates entries in the userplugin.ini file to match the new directories. The necessity for this approach came from the fact our servers are not as good (yet), so too many files(plugins) open would clutter the network connections. Otherwise I’d probably just load them over the network.
-Johan
Thank you everyone for all your inspiring ideas, really good info!