Setting up Sandcastle

I just spent an interesting few hours setting up Sandcastle. The whole process is absolutely insane. Sandcastle itself is no problem, and neither is Sandcastle Help File Builder (by the way, nice job). The problem is finding the help compilers. The Help File Builder home page provides a link to resources for all of the compilers which I completely missed. My bad.

You have to install the Visual Studio 2005 SDK. Or is the the VS 2003 SDK? Wait, I have VS 2008, so is it the VS 2008 SDK?  It depends on if you want the Help 1.x files generated or the Help 2.x files generated. The VS 2005 SDK puts HXCOMP.exe in an archive directory.

Why is  this so hard? Even though the Help File Builder seems to be the piece that requires the compilers, when you pull down Sandcastle it should give you everything you need for help files, after all, isn't this the whole point?

In the end I decided to go with the website version for my needs. I am building a help file for a set of WCF services. These will be outward facing and we don't know what our consumers will be using for their apps. Why does the HTML version of the help require an ActiveX control for the browser?

Maybe I am missing something so if anyone has any thoughts please pass them along.