The Haphazard Blog

I had trouble installing Visual Studio 2010 Professional RC on Windows XP last week. My issue was when I was running the installer, it would start a little bit and then the installation dialog would just exit. Looking at the log files from the installation (located in your user account’s temp folder, usually C:\Documents and Settings\User Account\Local Settings\Temp) didn’t really point to a specific cause.

I was able to install it by using the following command from within the setup folder at the command prompt:

setup /q /full

This ran the installation from the background, but be warned, it will cause your machine to automatically exit applications and reboot. In my case, my machine rebooted twice and after the second time, it was about 30-45 minutes before the installer was done (I could only tell by monitoring the task manager and the setup.exe process along with the constant creation of msiexec.exe processes). Unfortunately, Visual Studio would crash constantly (with no error) when I moused over the Toolbox.

Finally, I came across something on the MSDN boards. I wasn’t having the problem the person who posted the question was having, but this took care of my problem. I also suspect if I did this first, I would’ve been able to use the installer normally. The solution is to disable handwriting support. Since I don’t have a tablet, I didn’t need it (I don’t know why it was enabled in the first place).

1. Open the Control Panel
2. Choose Regional and Language Options
3. Go to the Languages tab
4. Click the Details… button in the Text services and input languages pane
5. Under Installed services under the Settings tab, Remove Handwriting Recognition
6. Click OK
7. Click OK

As I was getting the link to the RC when writing this article I saw there was an important note posted on the site:

Important Note: If you use IntelliSense on a device with UIA 3.0 (e.g., Tablet PC, touch display, some 3rd party applications), be sure to download these two hot fixes before using the RC (KB980610 and KB980920).

Installing those may also prevent the errors while maintaining handwriting recognition support if you need, but I’m not sure. I ignored those downloads at the time because I don’t have a tablet.