Problem installing VS.NET 2003 on Windows Server 2003

I’m cranking away on really learning ASP.NET by building my own photo gallery component (primarily for my ’95 BMW 540 M-Sport (www.kindel.com/bmw) registry). Even though I know it won’t perform as well I implemented it by writing the images (full size, medium size, and thumbnails) to the SQL Server. Fun stuff. Anyway, I deployed it to another server and wanted to debug. Didn’t have VS.NET installed on that server so debugging won’t work. So in went the MSDN DVD and I ran setup. Got:


Setup has detected that a previous version of Microsoft .NET framework 1.1 is currently installed. Uninstall this application before continuing with Setup….


Can’t uninstall 1.1 on W2K3 because it’s built-in. Searching the web found one hit that was sorta useful. Seems like I may have un-installed VS.NET incorrectly before or after upgrading this machine to W2K3 from W2K. But the hit didn’t actually help me fix the problem. Fortunately I work at Microsoft so sending mail to the internal VS.NET Setup DL was an option.


Here’s the suggested fix:



  1. Download the Windows Installer SDK and get msizap.exe from it.
  2. From a cmd prompt run msizap T {DF420000-A5AB-407C-92FF-D1D4B709B8F9}
  3. From a cmd prompt run msizap T {C9913503-1500-4454-94CD-365ADC1BB9B9}
  4. 4. Re-run VS.NET 2003 setup.

This get’s us past the first setup error. But then trying to install the pre-requisites gives another error! Arrrg.


Turns out this additional problem is because for some reason %windir%\system32 is taking precedence over the local dir when VS setup is spawing setup.exe, causing something else to execute. To get around this, and I had to go directly into the WCU directory on the DVD where the pre-requisites setup.exe is and run it from there. That did the trick.

Debate this topic with me:

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