I am attempting to install Managment Studio Express 2008 on a Win7 system that already has Visual Studio 2008 installed. I have installed VS 2008 SP1, which results in the About box for Visual Studio giving a version of 9.0.30792.1 SP.

When I attempt the Management Studio installation I see a message that tells me that I must install SP1. However, this is already installed. After a fair bit of searching I came across the link below, where someone had commented with a command line option for the installation executable that forced it to skip the check. However, this simply pushed the error to later in the installation process.

http://www.thushanfernando.com/index.php/2008/08/10/fix-rule-previous-releases-of-microsoft-visual-studio-2008-failed/.

This seems to be a perennial problem for Microsoft. I can't remember a time when I've painlessly installed both Management Studio and Visual Studio. I can't imagine that this is an unusual combination, after all!

Anyone had any success in solving this problem before I take on the day-long task of uninstalling and reinstalling Visual Studio and all its associated bits?