Hello John,
First of all, I am sorry to hear about the angry phone calls - we ourselves have faced a similar problem in the past so I definitely can understand your pain.
I know what code signing is, but some guidance on how to include that with Advanced Installer would really be helpfull
Regarding this, fortunately it's pretty easy to achieve - simply go to
"Digital Signature" page and sign your package from there.
Digital Signature: Sign MSI, EXE and MSP files
Now, besides that, what I would also suggest is the following - before each release, scan your MSI/EXE & binaries using VirusTotal. If anything comes up there, I would advise contacting the specific AntiVirus vendor for whitelisting - most of them have a section on their website where you can input files for whitelisting.
A little note here, I would advise doing so for well known Antivirus vendors, not for unknown ones (e.g. Rise is one of those if I remember correctly - a Chinese vendor who no longer have English support).
This is something we do before each release as well - our support team gathers the MSI and all its resources (dll files, exe files, etc.) and scans them. If something comes up, we postpone the release for 1-2 days until we get an answer from the vendors.
Even with this, considering how fast the AntiVirus heuristics change, we might be ok now and flagged the next day - but I have to admit this is quite rare and this solution has worked for us so far pretty well.
Hope this helps!
Best regards,
Catalin