Visual Basic 6 causes Visual Studio 2010 to attempt an installation

Question

I'm using Visual Basic 6 for a legacy project and it's been working fine. I recently installed the Visual Studio 2010 RC and now when I start VB6 I get an installer with the title "Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional RC - ENU". If I click Cancel I can then open my project in VB6.

Is there any way of getting rid of this, or am I just the only person on the planet still using VB6?

Update: The fix worked for ages but the problem started happening again a week or so ago. Has anyone else seen this reappear?

Update to the update: I had my PC setup as dual boot between Win7 and WinXP. It seems some required files were on the WinXP drive, and when I deleted it recently it caused the problem to reappear.

Answer 1

This is a known problem. Apparently Office apps can cause the same behavior. Like you, I saw it when I opened a VB6 project. It's still not fixed in the RC, but there is a workaround. You just have to create a directory and the problem will go away.

We've seen similar issues fixed by determining which directory VS expects to be created and then creating it. We’ve fixed this in our RTMRel product and the Visual Studio tools for office team has put an additional test to check for project. To work around this issue try creating the following directory. Open an elevated command prompt and type the following command and then open project again. Let me know if this fixes the issue.

Md "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\common7\IDE\FromGAC"

I also encountered this problem with the Visual Studio 2005 installer. The solution was a bit more tedious, but I eventually got it to stop.

I found this article that said to look at the MsiInstaller warnings in the application event log. There were two errors every time. First an error with event ID 1004 that describes the problem. This was followed by another error with event ID 1001 which was of no use. I just created every file and folder it named in the 1004 errors and the problem went away. I was getting ready to give up because I had no idea how many files it was going to complain about, but I kept at it and finally got it to stop. These files contain nothing. I just created new text files with my file manager and renamed them. Here's what I had to create.

• C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\al.exe
• C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\al.exe.config
• C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.Build.Conversion.dll
• C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.VisualBasic.xml
• C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.VisualStudio.VSHelp80.xml
• C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.Vsa.xml
• C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\SQLServer.targets
• C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.Configuration.Install.xml
• C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\RedistList
• C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\RedistList\VSList.xml