I’m finally able to install .NET 3.5 and run Visual Studio 2008 at my client.  Yeah, yeah,  ”Welcome to 2008” I can hear you say.  “You’re just in time for VS 2010!”  I know… but big ships turn slowly :)

Anyway, when installing Visual Studio 2008 I was promptly greeted with a slew of errors.  Checking the log yielded this not very helpful statement:

[02/02/09,13:53:22] Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component: [2] Error code 5 for this component means “Access is denied.

The knowledge base article it linked to was less than helpful as well.  A colleague asked me to crack open McAfee’s logs and sure enough… we found this in there:

2/2/2009    1:41:20 PM    Blocked by Access Protection ru    ZZZ\user     d:\wcu\webdesignercore\WebDesignerCore.EXE    C:\7912618bc3a93fed0bab\autorun.inf    User-defined Rules:Autorun_inf    Action blocked : Create
2/2/2009    1:53:22 PM    Blocked by Access Protection rule     ZZZ\user d:\wcu\webdesignercore\WebDesignerCore.EXE    C:\e300576fb9ee95c7e7e9c2cb\autorun.inf    User-defined Rules:Autorun_inf    Action blocked : Create
2/2/2009    2:02:08 PM    Blocked by Access Protection rule     ZZZ\user d:\wcu\webdesignercore\WebDesignerCore.EXE    C:\9e98c3f777aff7da331d68c05065b5\autorun.inf    User-defined Rules:Autorun_inf    Action blocked : Create

That is three separate installation attempts that failed.  Luckily my account had the ability to disable the sometimes-annoying-file-blocking-thingy in McAfee Enterprise.

If you’re getting this error, try disabling that guy to install Visual Studio.  Don’t forget to turn it back on though, or the corp network security guys with shotguns might visit your desk wondering why a worm installed on your machine was sending out emails to everyone in the company with a vulgar photo…

Hope this saves someone the 30 minutes it cost me today!