The announce.exe and announce.bin files are there just to provide an initial announcement to users following an installation (either new or a build). These "announcements" consist of a short list of the recent changes, or an important instruction.

These announcements are designed to only show 4 times. This is accomplished by updating "announce.bin" with each execution of announce.exe. You are the first to report a failure in this procedure.

My first suspicion is that you don't have the \caesar\system directory setup to allow users to "write" to this directory? This is a requirement (and the whole reason \system exists).

Please advise if this is indeed the problem.