diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index 1229a6ca9bf..ae349d4241d 100755
--- a/setup.py
+++ b/setup.py
@@ -74,7 +74,7 @@ def py2exe_options():
             'options' : {
                 "py2exe": {
                     "skip_archive": 1,
-                    "optimize": 2,
+                    "optimize": 0, # keep the assert running, because the integrated tests rely on them.
                     "dist_dir": 'dist',
                     "packages": [ "DAV", "HTMLParser", "PIL", "asynchat", "asyncore", "commands", "dateutil", "decimal", "docutils", "email", "encodings", "imaplib", "jinja2", "lxml", "lxml._elementpath", "lxml.builder", "lxml.etree", "lxml.objectify", "mako", "openerp", "poplib", "pychart", "pydot", "pyparsing", "pytz", "reportlab", "select", "simplejson", "smtplib", "uuid", "vatnumber", "vobject", "xml", "xml.dom", "yaml", ],
                     "excludes" : ["Tkconstants","Tkinter","tcl"],