Installation of last Visual Studio on my Vista was enough painful for me to make me post my troubles and solution in hope that may be they will help somebody else…

The nasty problem starts with installation of .NET Framework 3.5, which is a part of and a prerequisite for VS 2008: when installing it, Windows Update will ask you to restart your system. If you will accept rebooting while setup is still running, you will  end up with damaged and unfinished installation of .NET Framework 3.5. So, on Vista you shouldn’t accept restarting computer until installation of .NET Framework 3.5 or Visual Studio 2008 is not finished. The whole problem is described in Aaron Stebner’s weblog: How to avoid OS reboot prompt when installing the .NET Framework 3.5 on Windows Vista. It describes how to avoid it, but not how to make you system back and ready for a next installation, where you will follow recommendations and ignore restart proposal.

Solutions can be very different, it can depend from your concrete situation. After a bunch of tries, ~10 OS restarts, running tools, googling, reading MSDN forums I found my symptoms to be similar to those described here in “Issue 2″ and solution that worked for me:

  1. Install .NET Framework 3.5 beta 2. (I’m not sure if this is really required, but it worked for me)
  2. Uninstall .NET Framework 3.5 beta 2. Restart.
  3. Locate and uninstall any of updates named:
    • Hotfix for Microsoft Windows (KB110806)
    • Hotfix for Microsoft Windows (KB929300)
    • Hotfix for Microsoft Windows (KB930264)
  4. Reboot.

At that moment I was able to run successfully .NET Framework 3.5 installation and after that Visual Studio 2008.

Don’t forget: don’t accept restarting your Vista until installation of .NET Framework 3.5 or Visual Studio 2008 is finished.

And a link mini-dump with places to look for troubleshooting installation problems of Visual Studio 2008 and other related stuff:

Happy coding!