Apparently having a corrupted installer metabase can raise havoc with installing Microsoft software. This example relates to my attempt today to install my new laptop with all the relevant development tools to do my job, particularly MSXML6, and SQL Server 2005 management tools and references. However, the install continuously failed with the following error message, “The system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation”. Apparently, event though I’m a local administrator, I don’t have permissions to install this particular software. Funny, I swore I was a local administrator. Nonetheless, I spend an hour or so disabling antivirus, firewalls, and even logging in safe mode, to no avail.

So the fix to bypass this error, download and install the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility and remove all instances of the failed install attempts of MSXML and SQL Server components.

Viola, problem solved.

Learning is fun. Here is the somewhat new embedded MSN (Live) messenger control. We were trying to determine how or where you would actually implement this, but for now, cool factor will suffice.

On one of the Windows Live sites we visited today there was an add from Verio offering free Microsoft web hosting until January 2010 (around 2 years). Perfect to test some of these hosted Windows solutions.

Free Windows Hosting with Verio.

So another day at Windows Live Training at Microsoft. We have discussed quite a few of the great applications and implementations of Live technologies. I have known about the Live Writer for a while, but decided to test it on my blog, written on WordPress, to see if it will actually write posts to my blog. Lets just see…