Ken's Blog | If you reinstall VS.2005 and get a cryptic "vs

Tuesday, 26. February 2008

If you reinstall VS.2005 and get a cryptic "vs_setup.msi could not be opened" error02/26/2008 07:30 PM

If you ever need to reinstall VS.2005 and the SP1 update on your system and you hit this error, it's because the Windows Installer thinks they're still installed even after you delete the file. There are a few registry keys to remove: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0 (VS.Net 2005) and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Products
\0E8BA73496BF22242B086AF4D32E5219 (VS.Net 2005) and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Patches\C7C9F39D75BA8C44AB6D414976B4AC7F (VS.2005 SP1).
This is an unbelievably cryptic error...at the very least, it should put up an error message that says "it's already installed" instead of "could not be opened". It's almost worse than the cryptic "attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly" from old .exe or .dll files on your system that you migrated to XP...at least MS could say which file caused it :-P

Comments :

1. Rob07/07/2010 04:57:02
Homepage: http://xellc.com

Sweet, this was spot-on. Mine was telling me that the debugger could not run due to unmanaged code (for a C++ app). It worked a few days ago. Something got corrupted, no clue what or how; couldn't repair, so I deleted all, still wouldn't run the Maintenance Mode, so I found this. Thanks!!

2. Marko01/21/2009 08:47:09
Homepage: http://www.oette.info

Thanks, this post kept me from searching the whole registry.

By the way it seems to be enough to rename the Windows Installer entries.

By deleting the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0 key you may loose some of your settings from the old installation.

3. simon06/06/2008 17:01:30

I concur - You are a genius.
It worked perfectly on my XP64 installation.

4. Helmut03/18/2008 19:48:25

You are a genius. Thanks a lot.
The only difference on my machine the code under Classes\Installer\Products was different. So i went through all entries and watched out for the Visual Studio entry and renamed that registry-folder entry.
Finally i can repair the installation.
It's incredible how Microsoft-software is full of errors and problems.