If you are developing on an x64 machine, you may receive an error when installing Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1:

After opening the log you see this detailed message: “VC_IA64Runtime.exe - Exe installer's log file/hint (%temp%\dd_VC_IA64Runtime*.txt|%temp%\..\dd_VC_IA64Runtime*.txt) does not exist or is invalid”.

The solution for me was to uninstall the Remote Debugger from Add/Remove Programs and then install Service Pack 1.

For additional information on getting remote debugging back to work, see this article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y7f5zaaa.aspx 

The long story was that:

• I started applying this recent download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=98e83614-c30a-4b75-9e05-0a9c3fbdd20d. Each of the three downloads was followed by a reboot. No luck.
• I tried downloading the Service Pack again and also tried the EXE installer.
• I tried copying the contents of the ISO to the harddisk when I saw an error stating that the installer tried to create a folder on the source drive. Obviously this does not work since the source drive is a read-only mounted ISO just as a DVD would be.
• I tried applying the C++ runtime separately as the above error message is related to that.
• I tried uninstalling the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 components that I installed while they were in Community Technology Preview, amongst which ADO.NET Entity Framework and ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions.
• Also the Patch Removal Tool failed, pointing to an issue with the Remote Debugger: “CleanupBlock (UnAdvertiseFeatures) failed on product (Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Remote Debugger - ENU).”