After some time, I finally got Vista SP1 installed. I know, you never knew it was an issue for me, mostly because I never said so. The painful saga began when my laptop screen blanked out for some reason. Anyway, it gave me a good excuse to upgrade, meaning that I had to move anything meaningful from the old laptop to the new one. It was also a good excuse to load Vista on my laptop, which is when the fun began. Because I have my own MSDN subscription, I ordered the new laptop without upgrading the OS, meaning that it shipped with WinXP (or was it Vista Home). Anyway, my first task was to upgrade to Vista Ultimate. Instead of re-paving, I let Vista do an upgrade, which was my first mistake. That left me with a machine of unknown reliability because I didn't do the original install myself and left a bunch of OEM gunk in place.  My next mistake was dumping everthing there was from Windows Update onto my system. Hey, it's coming from Microsoft Right?!!  This has rarely ever been a problem, but I have experienced an occasional glitch from 3rd party drivers. In this case, I don't know what possessed me, but I installed all of the languages too. Later research revealed that this could have been part of my problems too. Needless to say, by the time Vista SP1 rolled around, it wouldn't install. I must have tried more times than I can count.  Anyway, I was having problems with some other software that should have been fixed by Vista SP1. So, all of the sudden, inability to install Vista SP1 became more than a passing annoyance.  Searching the Web, using every search engine, I found a varied array of solutions and dead-ends. Uninstalled language packs, which gave me errors too and I'm not totally sure they uninstalled correctly. Microsoft even has a KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947366, which didn't work either. I'm sure that KB was helpful for someone...

 

By this time, I definitely wasn't in the mood to re-pave. I do most of my work on my laptop these days and this would have put me even further behind on everthing than I already was (I'm sure you've been there). So, I did a re-install on Vista, looking for a repair option. I'm sure the repair option is somewhere, but I found the upgrade option. So, I went for it. Besides, I do regular backups and use source control and I imagined that a re-pave wasn't too far down the line. Well the upgrade worked without trashing everything I have. The upgrade resets everything, so you have to reinstall ASP.NET (remember aspnet_regiis -i?), but really, I just reinstalled VS2008. This led me to my recent blog post where LINQ and WPF were acting up. Other things, like ASP.NET State Server, need to be reset to Automatic and started.

 

Subsequently, my research led me to believe that I should take a minimalistic approach to Windows Update (to start off with at least). So I only updated with critical patches, and then optional OS upgrades.  I didn't touch any of the language upgrades this time, which I don't really need anyway and I suspect they were part of the problem. Today Vista SP1 installed via Windows Update without incident.  Too bad I can't remember the burning issue that caused me to think I needed it in the first place...

Working with Vista Ultimate and VS2008 and ran into errors titled "Child nodes not allowed" and "Required file 'alink.dll with IAlink3' could not be found". Yes, I have a Web Application and a WPF application in the same solution. It got this way because I re-installed Vista, trying to fix a problem that I'm still working on. Apparently, it wiped out some settings that VS2008 relies on to build .NET 3.5 apps. The solution is detailed pretty well here:

 

 

Essentially, go to \WCU\dotNetFramework\dotNetMSP\x86 on your VS2008 installation disk and run:

 

NetFX2.0-KB110806-v6000-x86.msu

 

and

 

NetFX3.0-KB929300-v6000-x86.msu

 

Replace x86 with x64 if you're running 64-bit.