Is it just me or is there some sort of Catch-22 about getting the new Visual Studio 2005 working on a system? I've been in installation hell ever since my disks arrived in the mail. No matter what order I try to do things, one of the installations fail. I finally thought I had made some progress when I got SQL Server 2005 installed and running, but when I then tried to install the Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server it wouldn't let me until I uninstalled .NET 2.0, and when I did that SQL Server broke. Then when I tried Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server again it said it couldn't install because SQL Server 9 was not running. Why do they call it SQL Server 9 anyway? I assume they mean SQL Server 2005, but are they just trying to be confusing?

And trying to install Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite I seem to be caught in an endless loop where each time I try to install it tells me a previous install failed and that it is going to uninstall that. Then after it does some uninstalling, it brings up a list of things I should remove that may be causing problems, none of which show up as installed programs. And it will continue doing this as many times as I care to try!

I'm sure I could start with a fresh install of Windows 2003 Server, but should that really be necessary? Anyone have any suggestions?

Dick