I'm wrinting a setup with InstallShield 2019.

The installation should be executed only if a specific National Instruments tool is present.

To check this pre-requisite I created a System Search to look into registry for the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\National Instruments\Measurement & Automation Explorer

I named this property as NIMAXFOUND.

Then created an install condition that uses this property. I used the same schema for many other prerequisite checks and it works fine.

With this specific registry key value the check doesn't work at all and furthermore during setup compilation the setup itself is executed .. I suspect that the presence of the unencoded '&' character is the main cause of this strange behaviour.
Removing the test on this property solve the self run issue (but of course it doesn't check the pre-requisite).

I checked the online help, googled and investigated the problem trough AI use but it seems that such character should not be encoded and there's not an example of using & in System Searches....

Someone experienced similar issues? How can I fix it?

BTW I'm saving the .ism file in xml format (for revision control).