I don't want to put how you do things where you work but I am not sure if it can be applied to how my school does things.
I know my school wants it so that a student clicks on the icon in ZenWorks and it installs in the background (since not every computer on campus needs the programs/most student's will never need the programs). No dialog boxes and no status bars. Just a bubble that pops up when it starts and ends.
With group policies, we have every student with on extremely limited accounts, along with professors. I don't think we can apply elevated rights to an object with ZenWorks.
We also have it set up so that no student account is connected to the file server and in ZenWorks the programs are found using a web address [i forget the technical name for this] like so: (\\applications.something.something.edu\applications).
I greatly appreciate your help and I will try to find a way to apply it to this problem but, I kinda came on here to find out why I can't use the .exe to create the silent installer with the install manager... :/