While I had no problem installing VS2008 SP1 on my virtual machines, I've been having a heck of a time installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 on my host OS ever since it came out. Since it shipped as an ISO, I simply mounted it using a virtual DVD drive. However every time I tried to install it, it would error out. I dug into the log file and found the following:

Patch (F:\vs90sp1\VS90sp1-KB945140-X86-ENU.msp) install succeeded on product (Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition - ENU). Msi
Patch (F:\vs90sp1\VS90sp1-KB945140-X64-ENU.msp) install failed on product (Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger - ENU). Msi

Ah... so it says it is failing to install the VS 2008 Remote Debugger. So I dug deeper in the install log to see exactly what the problem was:

MSI (s) (58:00) [18:10:00:665]: Product: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger - ENU -- Error 1303.The installer has insufficient privileges to access this directory: F:\Program Files.  The installation cannot continue.  Log on as administrator or contact your system administrator.

Error 1303.The installer has insufficient privileges to access this directory: F:\Program Files.  The installation cannot continue.  Log on as administrator or contact your system administrator.

Not enough privileges? I'm running an AD account that is in the domain Administrators group, I am in the local administrators group, Vista's UAC is turned off and I did the whole 'run as administrator' bit. Better yet, there is no such directory "f:\program files" ... the f: drive is my virtual DVD. So what gives?

Enter my awesome local MSFT DE, Joe Healy, who informed me that he'd heard of people having issues with some of the virtual DVD drives when installing SP1. Interesting how it wasn't affected using a mounted ISO for a virtual machine, but it was with one in the host VM.

At any rate, after copying the contents down to the file system and installing the service back from the disk, I had no problems. Thanks Joe!