Trouble running Deployed MATLAB application from DVD

Hello MATLAB wizards! I'm trying to distribute a MATLAB R2013 application to the folks in my office via a DVD. None have administrator rights or MATLAB installed, but they do have the MCR. My application is large and has many supporting files, so for ease of use and to conserve storage space, I want the application to run directly from the DVD. This works absolutely fine on my computer (I have MATLAB but no MCR). However, whenever I try to run the application on one of my colleagues' computers, it sits there, churning for about 5 minutes as if searching for something on the disk, then finally presents an "mclFreeStackTrace" error.

From my research, this error appears to be an issue with the .ctf file that was supposed to be embedded in the application by the compiler. I tried the commonly recommended workaround: forcing the compiler to save the .ctf file separately. I then extracted the contents of the .ctf file, and copied both the original and the extracted folder structure onto the DVD. No luck. It still runs fine on my machine, and spins for an eternity and finally coughs up the free stack trace error on my colleagues' computers.

Is there a way to point my application to the CTF archive in such a way that it can run from a read-only directory, like a DVD? Should I be saving the CTF to the DVD differently? Four months of work are hinging on getting this resolved. Help me Obi-Wan!

[Michael B]

Okay, so after some extensive testing and suggestions from Mathworks, this appears to be an issue with the MCR, not the CTF Archive as I had originally thought. Although the Mathworks team has insisted a CTF archive cannot run from a read-only source directory like a DVD, I found that it will in fact do so provided the archive has already been extracted to the same location.

The MCR is another story. The MCR I need to use is hosted on a network location or available on a DVD; it cannot be installed on each and every client machine I want to run the application on for practical reasons. Although the MATLAB Compiler documentation suggests that it should be possible and even simple to run a deployed application using the MCR from a network folder, every attempt I've made to do so has failed. It is as if the application can see the MCR and read the files, but something critical is missing. And of course, the only error it generates is the useless mclFreeStackTrace popup.

So, if anyone has any idea what might be going on here, I'd love to hear it!