I tried the latest beta of VS.NET 2005 a few weeks ago, didn’t enjoy it so I uninstalled it. Anyway, that’s by the by. My problem was when I was tried to put 2003 back on, I was getting the vague message “Please go to the control panel to install and configure system components”. Thanks. Any more hints?

It turns out, after much Googling the answer to the problem was to delete a registry key that seemingly has nothing to do with VS at all : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/App Paths/setup.exe

Renamed that whole section to setupNOMORE.exe and the installer was happy. I daresay there may be other issues that arise from this change in future, so I’ll put it back when the install is done.