One of my co-workers was struggling with a strange problem recently - he installed SQL Server 2005 (with Analysis Services 2005), but the Business Intelligence Studio application didn't install. If you haven't seen it, BI Studio is really just a special version of the Visual Studio 2005 IDE, with Analysis Services-specific projects and editors. What he saw was that even though the SQL Server installer claimed to have installed it, and even created a shortcut for it, the actual devenv.exe executable wasn't installed (the shortcut pointed to an invalid path). I'd installed SQL Server many a time, and never seen this problem. A search of the MSDN forums turned up this helpful topic, with the following advice from 'softie Dan Jones:
go
to the location for SQL Server setup and run
.\Tools\Setup\vs_setup.exe. This will install the VS Shell. After this
is installed repair the BI Studio installation by running the following
from the command line from the .\Tools directory: start /wait setup.exe /qb REINSTALL=SQL_WarehouseDevWorkbench REINSTALLMODE=OMUS
My co-worker tried it, and bingo, problem solved. I've still seen no satisfactory explanation for what causes the problem in the first place. We had no other versions of Visual Studio installed, which some other people have claimed triggered the problem. Very curious.