There are several known issues when installing Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1. I’ve documented these below and, when possible, have included workarounds and status on any pending fixes.

Contents

Error 1718.File ‘…’ was rejected by digital signature policy

Install Rolls Back and Breaks Applications like Live Messenger

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Takes a Long Time to Install

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Requires a Lot of Disk Space

Error 2908 – An Unexpected Error Installing the Package

Other Installation Errors

Error 1718.File ‘…’ was rejected by digital signature policy

This problem occurs mainly on Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, and could potentially occur on Windows XP. It does not occur on Windows Vista.

Starting with Windows XP, a software restriction policy known as SAFER was introduced as a preventative measure to help avoid running unsafe files. Both Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 require enough contiguous memory to check files, and Windows Server 2003 seems to fragment memory more heavily leading to this error message. Windows Vista performs the same check, but uses far less memory. In most cases following the instructions documented in KB925336 will work, but we received reports where these steps did not work. Investigation into these cases suggests the steps failed because an Active Domain policy refresh overwrote the local SAFER policy.

While we continue to investigate fixes to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 you can set a registry value to reliably install Service Pack 1. Follow the steps documented in the workaround for error 1718 to set the DWORD registry value named PolicyScope to 1 in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindowsSaferCodeIdentifiers registry key. If the registry value is not set you should set it, but if the domain policy updates your machine before each SAFER check is made while installing the patch you may still run into the same problem. Some people have confirmed that following the workaround steps allowed them to install Service Pack 1. Be sure to reboot your machine after both leaving the re-joining the domain.

Install Rolls Back and Breaks Applications like Live Messenger

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 for Standard, Professional, and Team editions is large – there are a lot of fixes in that package. Required disk space is calculated by Windows Installer when installing products and patches, and this task is not always accurate. Normally insufficient disk space means that Windows Installer displays one of several error messages depending on the circumstances. Whether a message is displayed or not, Windows Installer will roll back the installation. On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, this may mean that the manifest files under %WINDIR%WinSxS are removed. Any applications that depend on the VC runtimes in this directory will break. You can fix this issue by repairing Visual Studio 2005, either through Add/Remove Programs or by running setup.exe from your original installation media and choosing the Repair option.

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Takes a Long Time to Install

This is another documented problem due in large part to the number of fixes included in the service pack. For Team Foundation Services and Express editions, both time and space required to install their respective service packs is minimal. You can mitigate some time by disabling the patch cache and running silently.

Our product and patches for Visual Studio and the .NET Framework – except on Vista as installed with the operating system – use Windows Installer. Windows Installer is a robust, transaction installation that requires a lot of data collection and a two-phase installation to support transactional installation. Because of this and the disk I/O necessary long installation times should be expected. Disabling the patch cache will reduce the amount of disk I/O.

You can further save time by installing the patch silently, which reduces the number of steps and an extra security check required to install the patch for each product to which the patch applies. To install the patch silently, on the command line pass /quiet to the patch executable:

VS80sp1-KB926601-X86-ENU.exe /quiet

Replace VS80sp1-KB926601-X86-ENU.exe with whatever file name you downloaded is appropriate. The file here is for the English Visual Studio 2005 Standard, Professional, and Team editions.

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Requires a Lot of Disk Space

There are a lot of fixes in this service pack, and because of how Windows Installer caches patches a lot of disk space is required. Please make sure you have enough disk space to install the service pack as documented in the download page under “Installation Requirements”.

Note that if you have multiple products installed for a particular patch, multiply the required space for that patch by the number of products installed on your machine for which a patch applies. This is the maximum amount of disk space required so it is a high estimate. A typical case is Visual Studio 2005 Standard, Professional, or Team Suite installed along with the Team Foundation Client and/or SQL Server 2005, since SQL Server 2005 uses the Visual Studio IDE that we package. If you’re not sure what applicable products you have installed, extract the patch by passing /extract on the command line and use my Patch Applicability Browser, providing the extract .msp file you just extracted in the user interface.

Error 2908 – An Unexpected Error Installing the Package

This is another common issue related to the size of the patch and running out of disk space. Please free up some disk space as required for the patch and reinstall the patch. Note that because of the rollback, products that depend on VC may be broken until you repair Visual Studio 2005 or reinstall Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1.

Updated: Read Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Rollback Breaks Some Applications for more details.

Other Installation Errors

There are some other known issues once the patch is installed that are documented in KB928957. You may also continue to read my blog or, more specifically, the VS 2005 SP1 tag where I will post more information about other issues that may arise and any updates to workarounds or fixes.