The Berryware Blog

I recently upgraded one of my old desktop systems that had a VS 2008 Beta installed on it.  When attempting to install the gold version of VS 2008 it complained about the pre-release “Microsoft Windows Vista Client Headers and Libraries” still being present on the system.  This made some sense because the VS 2008 Beta uninstall had failed to uninstall some libraries.  I followed the work around documented on this page:

http://blogs.msdn.com/varungupta/archive/2007/11/27/i-uninstalled-visual-studio-2008-beta2-but-still-cannot-install-vs-2008-final-release.aspx

However, this process complained about a dependency on “vstscore_vs”.  The only page that had information on this was a Japanese page:

http://www.niuc.net/post/82/

(well, it looks like Japanese to me… I’m not really sure, but whatever it is I can’t read it!)

That same page mentioned “procore_vs” that is mentioned in the earlier article.  So, I put 2 and 2 together and figured that it was safe to use the “procore_vs” workaround for the “vstscore_vs” message.  It worked!

So, if you’re seeing a message about “vstscore_vs” then use the following step to remove the dependency:

Delete the following Registry key and try uninstall again.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\ProductReference\ReferencedProducts7D7D27646D242F5BC900906C330746E

The following warning note on the original page had made me nervous, but with the Japanese page showing this same step and mentioning both vstscore_vs and procore_vs I figured that it wasn’t that bad…

“Note: This workaround is for a specific case and don’t delete registry key in any other case.”

However… the usual disclaimer should be included: use at your own risk!  Also, could someone who understands Japanese perhaps confirm my hunches?