Visual Studio 2008 SP1 fails to install

Disaster! I Can't install VS2008 SP1

Every time I try and install it fails because of the VC++ run-time. What can I do? Oh what can I do?

As always, if at first you don't succeed... give up and throw a tantrum!

The Visual Studio 2008 SP1 always fails during the update to the VC++ run-time DLLs. The log file is not really helpful but since I have 2010 installed also and have applied all the updates to the Windows 7 I assume my VC++ 2008 run-time is probably more up to date than the SP1 anyway. How then can I move on?

I tried un-installing the VC++ 2008 run-time and reapplying the SP1. No joy. I tried using the installer cleanup tool to wipe them from the face of my machine. Equally unsuccessful. I even tried getting the most most most recent versions from Microsoft and reapplying the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to no avail.

My eventual solution? Cheat.

The fix I applied is to copy the service pack to your hard drive and edit the file ParamerInfo.xml. This file seems to be the data driven configuration controlling the SPInstaller tool.

Find the lines in the Items group calling the VC runtime installers, there should be three sets, and comment them out.

  <Items OnSubFailureAction="Stop" DownloadRetries="2" DelayBetweenRetries="5">

<!-- The start of my commenting here

    <Exe Name="VC_x86Runtime.exe" [snip...] </Exe>

    <Exe Name="VC_x64Runtime.exe" [snip...] </Exe>

    <Exe Name="VC_IA64Runtime.exe" [snip...] </Exe>

the end of my commenting here -->

Once you have saved away the changes re-run the service pack install tool and it will skip the VC++ 2008 SP1 run-time installation and go on to successfully install everything else.

Remember you will still need to install the VC++ 2008 SP1 run-time for x86 and x64 but you can get a standalone installer from Microsoft downloads for these and they work just fine.