Visual Studio 2003 Install Problem Solution

[tate]

Wow, why does the installation of Visual Studio have to be so difficult. I have never seen a program that is so particular except for deployment of an application that is created in .NET.

 

For those who may have run into the same problem my advice would be to closely evaluate the need for each item running in the background. Just disabling your antivirus or firewell doesn't do it. After many trips to the Internet to review stories of other unhappy installers I found a thread suggesting the use of MSCONFIG. Running this routine, unchecking all of the "Load" items, then only selecting "Windows Installer" in the services tab did the trick for me.

 

Hopefully this information will prevent someone from pulling out all their hair.

 

:)

[Robby]

What happened exactly?

 

I have installed 2002 more than a dozen times and 2003 a handfull, never had any trouble.

[iebidan]

yeah, what happened?, I installed VS several times in several computers and never had a problem, the most complicated part (and imagine how complicated it got) was selecting what I wanted to install.

[tate]

I guess I should have been a little more specific. I have encountered numerous problems when trying to install Visual Studio when there was a prior version already on the machine. If the PC was of a virgin nature I have not had any problems. In this particular instance the PC already had Visual Studio 2002 with framework 1.0 in it. My goal was to uninstall these and install Visual Studio 2003 and framework 1.1. My troubles began when the uninstall of Visual Studio 2002 was not successful. No reason was given it just hung part way through. Every future attempt was unsuccessful as well. So my only recourse was to manually delete everything from the harddrive and to comb the registry to delete all traces. As you can imagin this was an exercise in futility. In addition I manually deleted the framework 1.0. Norton WinDoctor was used to clean up things a bit before the new install. While running the 2003 setup (antivirus and firewall disabled), as expected, the Runtime files, framework 1.1, and the J# redistributable needed to be installed first. The Runtime files appeared to load OK and then hung at the very end. No error given it just hung there. So I manually installed the framework 1.1 and J# redistributable using seperate files pulled from Microsoft. When I ran the 2003 setup again only the Runtime files were needed as expected. Once again my machine hung at the end of this install. After pulling my hair out and yelling at Bill Gates I finally found the thread suggested MSCONFIG. After following the recommendations for only running the bare essentials the install went through like a charm. Now why doesn't Microsoft's install instructions just inform you how to do this from the start if it is so darn important? Their instructions only recommend that all background applications be closed. Normally this would mean to me that I close everything that is shown in the system tray. I didn't know about the use MSCONFIG. Just because items in the system tray are closed doesn't insure things are not running still.

 

Tate