I Installed Orca ages ago during its beta period.

Then I downloaded dreamspark's Visual Studio Pro 2008.

When I ran it it complained that I needed to uninstall Orca. I tried it failed. I did some research and couldnt find and removal instructions so I tried to get rid of it by deleting the directory manually and removing every entry for visual 2008 I could find in the registry. When I tried to reinstall Visual Studio 2008 pro it failed again.

In desperation I contacted Microsoft help from Dreamsparks link and was replied to, asking for more details which I duly sent, then heard nothing back. I tried again and was apparently ignored. later Microsoft issued an Orca manual removal site that showed removing the installs in a particular order. This was too late for me since I had already tried to remove the program myself.

...So I gave up.

Now I come to try to install XNA 2.0 and the program installs then removes itself says that an error has occured. It doesnt describe the error and researching how to fins the install log file it says that it should be located in the program subdirectory. Well it never creates that subdirectory, so I cant open the installation log to find out why it's not installing.

There must be a key that both Visual Studio 2008 and XNA are looking at that tells it that Orca is installed. But where is it?

I can't uninstall the OS otherwise all the Programs that I got from Dreamspark will be lost due to the "One shot serial key" system.

Can anyone help me correct this problem get this program installed and/ or my legit visual studio pro 2008 on this machine?

XNA 2.0 doesn't work with VS 2008. You have to have VS 2005 or VC# 2005 Express for XNA GS 2.0 to install properly.

I realise that. You may want to read the post again. This is not to do with 'wanting' to install any version of studio, it's wanting to remove a previous corrupt installation.

Microblitz:

I can't uninstall the OS otherwise all the Programs that I got from Dreamspark will be lost due to the "One shot serial key" system.

If that's true, that's just plain freakin' stupid. There's gotta be a way to reinstall if you need to.

Part of the joy of working with beta software is the challenge of cleaning up. If you're not prepared to accept the worst case scenario of having to reformat don't use beta software.

XNA Game Studio 2.0 creates a set of log files when setup fails, and they should be left behind for troubleshooting purposes after the failure occurs.  There is a list of these log files in this blog post.  Could you please gather and zip these log files, upload them to a file server somewhere and then post a link here so we can download the logs and take a look?

Also, for your Visual Studio 2008 installation issue, there is a list of log files created by that setup in this blog post.  If you would like to upload those as well, I can try to take a look and see if I can figure anything out about that error too.  There is also a Visual Studio setup forum that you can use for this type of issue.  You will find more people who read that forum that have specific expertise in troubleshooting Visual Studio installation issues.

Thanks!

Microblitz:

I realise that. You may want to read the post again. This is not to do with 'wanting' to install any version of studio, it's wanting to remove a previous corrupt installation.

Your topic's title - "XNA game studio installation problem"

Microblitz:

Now I come to try to install XNA 2.0 and the program installs then removes itself says that an error has occured.

I'm not sure how I thought your post had anything to do with installing XNA Game Studio. ;-)

At any rate, I was just pointing out that any attempts to install XNA GS 2.0 with only Orcas and/or VS 2008 installed would not work and might explain the error you got when installing XNA 2.0.

Thanks for the reply.

Ok I read that post via a search through google and went hunting for the directory and couldn't find it.

When the XNA installation starts everything proceeds as if it were going to install then it simply says and error has occured and uninstalls itself before I get a chance to see any error logs. I can only assume that the deinstaltionof the program directory is part of the uninstall along with the destruction of the log files.

When looking to the directory listed in the post it simply doesn't appear to be there. I have checked both directries (program file (x86) and program files).

Thanks for your considered reply.

Microblitz:

When the XNA installation starts everything proceeds as if it were going to install then it simply says and error has occured and uninstalls itself before I get a chance to see any error logs. I can only assume that the deinstaltionof the program directory is part of the uninstall along with the destruction of the log files.

When looking to the directory listed in the post it simply doesn't appear to be there. I have checked both directries (program file (x86) and program files).

The log files described in that blog post should get created as long as you get far enough into setup that it starts installing packages.  Specifically, this means that you need to have accepted the license agreement, selected whether or not to configure firewall exceptions, and then clicked Next to start the installation process.  Setup has logic to remove the log files if installation succeeds, but it should leave them behind in case of a failure to allow for troubleshooting.

Maybe the logs are ending up in a different location on your system for some reason.  Could you try to search your hard drive for any logs named GameStudioSetup*.log and see if you can find the logs that way instead?

Thanks!

I found it but they are 3.18 MB in size each. Too big to post, do you have a and email ftp or some ofther way of viewing them ?

I don't have an FTP server for this, but most online file servers offer a ton of free storage.  For example, http://skydrive.live.com/ lets me upload a gigabyte of data.  Could you try to use that or something similar?  Also, the logs compress very well because they are text files, so I'd suggest zipping them before uploading them as well.

Thanks!

Yes I have a Skydrive, Ive not really used it much except for photos. By the way thank you for going beyond the call of duty on this one I really appriciate it.

Ithink this is the right way to use this function.

http://cid-f66b553073c44bd9.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Public

let me know if it comes down ok, I zipped it up.

Chris Neary

Hi,

Thanks for posting the log file - I was able to access it fine on your SkyDrive share.  From this log, it looks like there is some inconsistent information in your registry that is causing XNA Game Studio 2.0 setup to get confused.  The log shows the following:

• Visual C# 2005 Express was detected as installed
• Visual C# 2005 Express SP1 was not detected as installed
• Visual Studio 2005 standard edition or higher was not detected as installed
• Visual Studio 2005 standard edition or higher SP1 was detected as installed

As a result of these inconsistencies, the main UI for XNA Game Studio 2.0 did not correctly tell you that you are missing one of the Visual Studio prerequisites, but then the installer failed later on because it didn't find the full set of prerequisites when it did another check later on in the install process.

I think your best option here to fix this would be to install Visual C# 2005 Express SP1 (choose the item named VS80sp1-KB926749-X86-INTL.exe on this page) and then re-run XNA Game Studio 2.0 setup.

Can you please give that a try and let us know if you run into any further installation issues?

Thanks!