Visual Studio 2005 Installation Problems

The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2908

OK, I just ended up having to burn one of my MSDN incidents :( because I could not get Visual Studio 2005 to install correctly, so I figured I'd blog the solution so someone else could benefit from it.

The Error

The error message I got simply said that Document Explorer 2005 failed to install. Tracing the event log I got the following:

Product: Microsoft Document Explorer 2005 -- The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2908. The arguments are: {FAA7C2AC-4205-4228-BEB6-6E647CCA9FD2}, ,

followed by:

Product: Microsoft Document Explorer 2005 -- Error 1935.An error occurred during the installation of assembly 'Microsoft.MSXML,Version="8.0.0.0",PublicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a",Culture="neutral",FileVersion="8.0.50727.42",ProcessorArchitecture="MSIL"'. Please refer to Help and Support for more information. HRESULT: 0x80131700. assembly interface: , function: CreateAssemblyNameObject, component: {B1BE189C-054D-4195-9C26-49D28C20DE94}

The Solution

The problem was solved by following these steps:

1. Uninstall .NET 2.0.
1. Click "Start". The Windows Start Menu pops up.
2. Click "Control Panel". The Control Panel windows opens.
3. Double Click "Add/Remove Programs". The Add/Remove Programs window opens and after some period of scanning for applications, presents you with a list of installed applications.
4. Select the ".NET Framework 2.0" application and select to remove it.
2. Delete temp files.
1. Click "Start". The Windows Start Menu pops up.
2. Click "Run". The Run command window opens.
3. Enter "%temp%" and click OK. This will open your Temp folder.
4. Press Ctrl+A. This will select all the files in the folder.
5. Press Shift+Del to delete all files listed that are not locked. The delete process may abort on error several times stating that a particular file could not be deleted. Simply unselect that given file by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking the file and continue the deletion. In my case there were 2 files that could not be deleted in the end.
3. Add registry key.
1. Click "Start". The Windows Start Menu pops up.
2. Click "Run". The Run command window opens.
3. Enter "regedit" and click OK. This will open RegEdit.
4. Navigate down to HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer.
5. Right click in the right hand pane. A popup menu with one option, "New" appears.
6. Click "New". A new popup menu with several options appears.
7. Click "String Value".
8. Change the "New Value #1" text to "Logging".
9. Double click the "Logging" entry. The value edit window opens.
10. Change the value of the key to "VoiceWarmup" & click OK.
11. Close RegEdit.
4. Install the .NET Framework 2.0.
1. Open Windows Explorer.
2. Navigate to "D:\wcu\dotNetFramework".
3. Double click "dotnetfx.exe" to install the framework.
5. Install the Microsoft Document Explorer 2005.
1. In Windows Explorer, navigate to "D:\wcu\DExplore".
2. Double click "DExplore.exe" to install the Document Explorer.
6. Install Visual Studio 2005 as per normal from here.

That worked for me... hopefully, it will work for you too! :)