The Windows 8 SDK has a new version of Orca for those of us who edit msi files. The download is for a small executable, sdksetup.exe which causes the following dialog box to appear. If you only want Orca and you don’t want to install the SDK, override the default and download all of the files to the location of your choice. In this example, the files are downloaded to D:\Media\Windows8\SDK
Figure 1. Downloading the Windows 8 SDK to D:\Media\Windows8\SDK instead of installing it.
Click the Download button to download the files.
Figure 2. Windows 8 SDK full download.
After the files are downloaded, you will find an Installers subfolder underneath the folder you specified. In this example, that would be D:\Media\Windows8\SDK\Installers
Figure 3. Windows 8 SDK download contents.
In the Installers subfolder you will find a Orca-x86_en-us.msi file that contains Orca. You don’t have to run the msi and install Orca. You can just extract it.
Open a command prompt (administrative prompt not required) and enter something similar to the following command to extract the Orca files (I found I had to use a full path for targetdir):
msiexec /a Orca-x86_en-us.msi /qb targetdir=D:\Media\Windows8\OrcaFiles
The extraction process creates an Orca subfolder containing the Orca.exe file. You can run Orca from that folder. It does need the other files in the directory to work. You can copy the entire folder to another location, even another computer and run Orca without installing it.
Figure 4. Orca 5.0.9200.16384