Visual Studio 2008 Errors

Recently I had my VS 2008 RTM/RC installation go pear shaped. Overnight I stopped being able to create VC++ smartdevice projects with the error

“Creating Project '<ProjectName>'... project creation failed”

‘No problem’, I thought, ‘I’ll just run setup and do a repair’.  Unfortunately, I got an error with the setup of

“A problem has been encountered while loading the setup components. Canceling setup.”

Luckily I came across a post on StackOverflow (which is running turning out to be a useful resource from the author of CodingHorror.com) pointing to a Microsoft tool to ‘force’ uninstall various Microsoft products, including Visual Studio:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb968856.aspx