Last week I installed SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition on a development PC. This took almost as long as installing an Oracle server, which is not what I am used to when running a 'routine' SQL Server Setup.
The SQL 2005 installer starts off with a check for all the prerequisites, and all lights were green. I choose an allmost default install of the client tools and the SQL instance itself. When half way installing the required components I got a message that I had a previous version of the 'Office Web Components' (OWC) installed. I needed to remove this previous installation and restart the setup of SQL Server. Bummer.
Checking the 'Add / Remove programs' applet I found that there was indeed a OWC XP version installed, after choosing 'Remove' and clicking through the dialogs I was ready for a retry. Starting up de SQL server setup again choosing the same options as before, all lights green again and .... 'a previous version of OWC is found, please uninstall and redo all the stuff you did twice before ....grrrrr.
Once again I fired up the add / Remove programs and found that now OWC 2003 was installed. Again I uninstalled it, did a reboot for safety and restarted the SQL Server Setup. What do you know... again the same message.
For the third time (of the forth I forgot the actual count) I uninstalled OWC from the Add / Remove programs applet and immediately after removing it I reopened the Add / Remove programs and It was still there!! Even after another reboot, uninstall etc etc the Add remove programs still showed OWC 2003 installed.
As a last resort I located the OWC11.msi on the SQL Server 2005 CD and reinstalled it directly from there. After this I was able to to re-run the SQL Server setup with no problem.