Visual Studio 2008 Failed Installation (Solved)
I had Visual Studio 2008 Team RC installed on my laptop and I wanted to install the RTM version so I uninstalled the RC and launched the RTM setup but the setup would fail. After a little digging and reading ScottGu's blog, I figured out that the Visual Studio setup install numerous products by launching separate installations. So when you actually uninstall VS, you're not uninstalling everything that was actually installed.
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-2008-and-net-3-5-released.aspx
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People often ask me for suggestions on how best to
upgrade from previous betas of Visual Studio 2008. In
general I'd recommend uninstalling the Beta2 bits
explicitly. As part of this you should uninstall Visual
Studio 2008 Beta2, .NET Framework Beta2, as well as the
Visual Studio Web Authoring Component (these are all
separate installs and need to be uninstalled separately). I
then usually recommend rebooting the machine after
uninstalling just to make sure everything is clean before
you kick off the new install. You can then install the
final release of VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 on the machine.
Looking at the Programs and Features entries, I uninstalled these products in this specific order, then went to install VS 2008 RTM without a glitch.
Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite
MSDN
Library for Visual Studio 2008 - ENU
Microsoft Document
Explorer 2008
Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring
Component
Microsoft Windows SDK for Visual Studio 2008
.NET Framework Tools
Microsoft Windows SDK for Visual
Studio 2008 SDK Reference Assemblies and IntelliSense
Microsoft
Windows SDK for Visual Studio 2008 Tools
Microsoft SQL
Server Compact 3.5 Design Tools ENU
Microsoft SQL
Server Compact 3.5 ENU
Microsoft Device Emulator
version 3.0 - ENU
Microsoft .NET Compact Framework
3.5
Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5