visual studio .net setup: Earlier I saw that many people had experienced the same frustrations
that I had when installing Visual Studio.Net 2003 Enterprise Architect
edition, namely, that even after choosing the third installation
option (install MSDN) and installing successfully, Visual Studio
complains that no help is installed! This happens even if you
uninstall/reinstall the MSDN by using the setup.exe command directly
on the CDs.

The crux of the problem seemed to center around installations like
mine whose version of MSDN was the January, 2003 version (or earlier).
The only solutions I could find in this newsgroup were either: (a) you
probably installed something incorrectly (which was clearly not the
case), or (b) you need to buy a version of the MSDN that is the April
2003 version or older (something that is exasperating when the #$%@
dealer shipped this January 2003 version on a purchase made just last
week!!).

Fortunately, I didn't believe either answer (respectfully) that was
posted in this group, and did some digging and poking around instead.
I have come up upon a solution that has solved my broken MSDN problem
and might well solve yours too.

Here's what to do:

1. Close Visual Studio .NET. Go to START, RUN and type REGEDIT. Click
OK.

2. Navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\Help\0x0409\{32AF
11EA-A804-47bd-BDAE-31653BD0CDD9} [NOTE: This last number in between
the curly braces is a GUID. Your GUID will likely be different than
mine, but it should be the only one in this location so you can't
possibly select an incorrect GUID.]

3. Select the GUID on the left hand side. Then in the right side of
the
registry editor, select the value named "VS_Docs". Double-click on it.
If the value says "Not supported" you can change it to read "7.1"
(without the quotes).

4. Close the registry editor and restart Visual Studio.

Voila! The ^%$#@-ing annoying broken help messages are fixed once and
for all! This will be especially welcome news (I think) to people
whose bosses (like mine) aren't keen on the idea of shelling out more
$$$ to buy a newer version of the MSDN right away. I **still** intend
to pressure my boss to let me get the latest update of MSDN (always a
good policy, IMHO), but I won't be getting those annoying messages &
will have context-sensitive help in the meantime! :-)

I hope that my posting helps someone else who's in the same boat!

Hi James,

Thanks for posting. We have encountered a number of reports regarding the
wrong MSDN issue. Some vendors are shipping the wrong CDs.

There is another solution. You may contact Microsoft Product Support
Services and I believe that you will get a satisfying answer.

http://support.microsoft.com/support/webresponse.asp

I hope the information is useful to you.

Regards,

Felix Wang
Microsoft Online Partner Support
Get Secure! - www.microsoft.com/security
This posting is provided "as is" with no warranties and confers no rights.