Some customers are reporting that Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta tries to install multiple times. There are a couple of actions that can reproduce this issue.

First, because the SP1 patch is so large, it takes a while for wrapper to extract it. You can verify this by watching the working memory set increase in the task manager. Without any progress or status while extraction occurs in the beta patch, users might be inclined to double-click it again – perhaps even multiple times. We realize the lack of progress is a problem and are working to address that for the release of SP1, but for now only run the patch once. If you’re not sure if it’s running, press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to bring up the task manager (taskmgr.exe), switch to the Processes tab, and find the name of the wrapper in the list (sorting by Image Name helps).

Second, the patch may apply to multiple products that you have installed on your machine. The native wrapper is designed to apply the patch individually to every applicable, installed product which results in the same UI sequence – if not running silently – for each product installed. Windows Installer would do this in separate transactions anyway, but installing the patch in this manner allows us to control reboots more effectively. To determine if this is the case, please download and install the Patch Applicability Browser. This will display to which products the patch applies, and which of those products are installed on your system. Having multiple products installed (checked) means you will see the patch UI the same number of times. You can run the patch silently for a more friendly unattended experience like in the following example:

> start /wait VS80sp1-KB918525-X86-Beta-ENU.exe /quiet /L*v+ VS80sp1-KB918525-X86-Beta-ENU.log

Logging is only an option, but is recommended in case other errors do occur. Additional logging options for the native wrapper and msiexec.exe are also available. Please be sure to attach logs to any bug reports.