Why does VS2008 fails to install
There could be various reasons why VS2008 will fail to install. It will be very frustrating especially for the very early adapters of the released development tool.
Well it could fail due to may reasons primarily because VS2008 beta versions may have been installed. There are numerous blogs and articles that you can google for how to fix them.
My issue was entirely different. I did not have any Beta software installed, yet it would fail on me. I promptly contacted Microsoft for support and they have been good.
I have McAfee installed on my workstation. One of the settings in the console it to disallow programs to be istalled as services, which was checked. This caused my installtion to fail. It took me couple of days to figure this out. When folks at MS asked me to install calc.exe as a service, which by the way also failed initially, I got the idea that may be McAfee is the reason. So I went and checked all the settings and found that new services were not allowed to be installed.
VS2008 tried to install remote debugger as a service and failed because of this setting.
All I did was uncheck the option in McAfee and was able to install VS2008 smoothly.
Hope you will find this article useful for those of you who may have similar issues as mine.
Ananth Godavari