Failure Installing VS 2008 SP1

Question

I am trying to install VS 2008 on Windows 7 x64 and am running into a fatal exception during the installation. The relevant error message is the following:

C:\Users\jayna\AppData\Local\Temp\Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1\VC_IA64Runtime.exe - Exe installer's log file/hint (%temp%\dd_VC_IA64Runtime*.txt|%temp%..\dd_VC_IA64Runtime*.txt) does not exist or is invalid.

I have found several articles on this, the most promising of which indicates that the remote debugger should be uninstalled. I run into another issue when trying to do this which indicates that there are "invalid characters in the Program Files path".

--------------------------- Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger (x64) Setup --------------------------- Error 1324.The folder path 'Program Files' contains an invalid character.

Another article suggested turning off Virtual Clone Drive to resolve the latter issue, which i have done to no avail.

As you can see, I'm hitting some dead ends here. Any suggestions or advice would be most appreciated at this point.

Answer 1

Finally got this worked out, and I had to uninstall visual studio 2008. I used the visual studio 2008 uninstall tool.

Still go the mysterious "Error 1324.The folder path 'Program Files' contains an invalid character." error but finally got to the bottom of that with help from this article. Seems that the installer is trying to write to a location that cannot be written to. I disabled my DVD drive and my SD slot as well as disabling Virtual Clone Drive and any other drives on my machine that I cannot write to, and finally, the uninstall didn't crash on me...

Wow...

Answer 2

Before doing anything drastic, what I would recommend is turning off (i.e., uninstalling) all things related to IA64, by using a custom install (or removing already installed items via maintenance). If you are not going to target the Itanium processor (i.e., IA64), there's no point in installing all the junk that comes with VS for it and running into install issues like the one that broke your upgrade (to SP1).