First off, this was one of the worst installation experiences I've ever had,
and I've helped nine developers install this nightmare of a product. Maybe
the product is ok, but the install is horrendous. I've got one install that
went even more badly than the others...

The short version is that the install did not complete successfully and
there's nothing in Add/Remove Programs concerning SP1. Here are the details.
This particular machine had 10 gigs free on the drive with Visual Studio,
and 3 Gigs free on the system drive. The paging file and My Documents were
both on the drive with 10Gigs free, so you'd think there'd be precious little
space needed on the system drive - oh how naive I was. After hours of pain
and suffering, I got the thing to update both the Premiere partner Edition
and then the Team Edition. The third section, whatever that was, failed when
it couldn't unpack a file and ultimately locked up the machine. I had run
out of space on the system drive and had no choice but to reboot, since the
system was completely unresponsive.

Now that I have a better understanding of how SP1 needs more space than the
original Visual Studio install, and how that space needs to be available on
your system drive (regardless of where My Documents or the Paging file
reside), I'd like to try again. I need to unistall it first though, and I
don't know where to begin. The Windows/Installer/$PatchCache$ folder is huge
right now, but I've read it's touchy messing with it.

Any help on completely eliminating all traces of this beast will be greatly
appreciated, so I can start over. Also, any hope that MS will never again
release such a bad installer will be appreciated (emotionally) as well.

Thanks.

Hello Tim,

From your description, you've encountered problem installing the Visual
Studio 2005 SP1 on a certain machine, and after the installation failture,
you can not find the entry to remove it in "control panel-->add remove
program", correct?

First, I really feel sorry for the bad experience it brings you as VS 2005
SP1 does be a big one. Based on my experience, for VS 2005 SP1
installation, a typical issue is it will require a large number of
sequential physical memory for checksum verification which cause the
installation fail. To overcome it, the machine admin can disable the
"software enforcement " in "software restriction policy". Here are some
articles mentioned this and some other SP1 install related issues:

http://blogs.msdn.com/knom/archive/2007/05/02/problems-with-visual-studio-20
05-sp1-on-windows-2003-server.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2006/10/06/VS-2005-SP1-Takes-a-While-to
-Install.aspx

Also, as you said that you can not locate the VS 2005 SP1 entry in "Add
remove programs", then, what will you get if you directly reinstall the SP1
without do any uninstallation operations? I've discussed with some other
setup engineers and I'm afraid so far "using add/remove program" is the
only supported means to uninstall VS 2005 SP1. If you can not find the
entry and it continue preventing you from reinstall the SP1, I would
suggest you try uninstalling the VS 2005 completely and reinstall them
together.

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead



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So, will uninstalling VS2005 remove all the files from my system drive that
are being soaked up by SP1?

Hi Tim,

Thanks for your followup.

Sure, when you uninstall the entire VS 2005, the SP1 compontens and updates
are expected to be removed also.

Also, I've also ping some other VS setup team engineers on this issue to
see whether they can give some better ideas. I'll inform you as soon as I
get any update.

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead


This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Hi Tim,

Sorry for keep you waiting.

After some further discussing with the VS 2005 sp1 product team engineers,
so far there seems haven't any documented means to remove SP1 without the
"add/remove programs entry". Since windows installer is a transactional
engine, all the work should be rolled back if install attempt fails. For
something that may go wrong on VS 2005 SP1, the technical lead Heath
Stewart has suggested some articles on his msdn blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/

clicking VS 2005 SP1 on the right side.

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead


This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Thank you for your response. I think I will stick with the complete
uninstall of VS 2005. That seems like the path of least resistance, believe
it or not. At least I'll feel confident that the patch remnants will be
cleaned out.

Tim

Thanks for your reply Tim,

Sure, I agree that perform a complete remove and reinstall should be the
thorough solution here. Anyway, really feel sorry for the poor experience
it brings you. If you have anything else need our help, please don't
hesitate to post here.

Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead


This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.