Reinstall .NET version 2002 on NT4 SP6A - impossible?

[Young Coot]

Hello -

Glad this newsgroup is here. I'd like to compare notes and see if someone
else has experienced this problem and if there is a workaround for it
(besides new OS and VS.NET version).

Background: Installed version 2002 of Visual Studio .NET Academic on NT4
SP6A system about a year and a half ago, worked perfectly at that time.
Used it quite a bit up until about July. About a month ago had a potentially
disasterous uninstall of another program when it took the ATAPI driver out
without replacing it (I know - major bonehead move) making the hard drive
unbootable. Did a repair, got back in, OS boots just fine again, but
anything having a tie-in with DCOM (such as MDM in Visual Studio) needed to
be reinstalled. Various add-on services were wiped in the process of
rescue - Diskeeper, Norton AV, MSInstaller - and each of these reinstalled
without issue.

Now the tricky part: Visual Studio repair hit a brick wall because it says I
need to reinstall Service Pack 6A. OK, I humored it - reinstalled Service
Pack 6A (the high-encryption version available on-line rather than the one
on the VS CDs) and then the other various hotfixes that needed to be
reinstalled again after that - maybe 50 megs worth - so far the OS still
boots fine with no issues. But Visual Studio still says I need to reinstall
Service Pack 6A before continuing. Been there, done that. So I uninstalled
the entire VS.NET package and am now looking at what to do next.

I know pretty well where the path is pointing - new OS (XP Pro probably) and
the "new improved" VS.NET version - but I'm cheap. And I know this
combination of NT4 SP6A and VS.NET v.2002 works so I'd like to squeeze a
little more use out of it. My question has to do with what may have changed
in some update or other that the Visual Studio installer is seeing. I've
looked in the logs that the installer left in the TEMP directory, and the
message indicates that the version is higher than baseline. That should not
prevent repair or installation, seems to me.

Anyone seen this one? TIA for any insight shared.

YC

 

[Young Coot]

Me again, replying to my own post - I found out what was hanging it up. I'm
posting this here for the benefit of someone who might have the same problem
in the future.

The MDAC 2.7 DLLs were of mixed version, most from 1999 (put there by the
Visual Studio update disc) and a few from 2001 (probably left there from an
SQL Server installation I had on this machine briefly). As a consequence of
this incompatability between DLLs, MDAC 2.7 would not initialize making the
Visual Studio installation balk. Since the installation of the update would
not overwrite newer DLLs, the whole process was stuck in a vicious circle.

I looked for, and found, a newer version of the 2.7 MDAC package on the
Microsoft website (new as of December 2002) which overwrote all of the
affected DLLs. Once I did that, the Visual Studio installation went without
a hitch. I now have a functional VS.NET once agian.

YC