Rule "Previous releases of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008" failed

Today I was trying to install SQL 2008 on my box and the setup stopped after checking a bunch of rules. The error message was the title of this post.

A quick search on the internet revealed that somehow the installer didn't believe I had VS 2008 SP1 installed, which I did. The recommendations in the KB article were kind of insulting. There's no way I'd spend hours of my day uninstalling and reinstalling VS and SQL — sorry, no chance. I also could not accept not installing the Management Tools, for example. I also did not have any Express version of VS or SQL installed in this box.

A little snooping around with ProcMon led me to the following registry key:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\DevDiv\VS\Servicing\9.0\IDE\1033

In that key I noticed the suspicious values:

"SP"=dword:00000000
"SPIndex"=dword:00000000
"SPName"="RTM"

Without quitting the SQL server installer validaton screen, I changed these values to what you see below, crossed my fingers and rerun the installer validation, which passed!

"SP"=dword:00000001
"SPIndex"=dword:00000001
"SPName"="SP1"

Now, I didn't really guess those values. I looked in a sibling registry key (...Servicing\9.0\PRO\1033) and saw that it contained those new values, then I copied them.

I think I didn't break anything. So far all seems to be working. But, as usual with anything related to manual registry hacking, you have to be really insane to change your settings because you read on a random blog on the 'net. I'm just saying... Don't come crying if your house burns down because of this.