Ok, I just installed visual studio .net academic, when trying to run the program, a message box pops up saying "The application cannot start.", the message box has an ok button and a help button. When I click the help button all it tells me is "you may need to reinstall visual studio .net"... I did this, twice. It still gives me the same error every time, this is very frustrating. This same error also happens whenever I try to open any recent help files (like the latest platform SDK documentation, the latest directX docs, the visual studio .net docs, all of that). Do I have to reinstall windows (im on windows xp) to fix this? Has anyone had similar errors in the past?

You get the message box when trying to run VS.net itself? Sounds like a bad install, you may need a new CD. I wouldn''t reinstall XP, I wouldn''t think that would help, but you never know with Windows eh?

I can''t understand it. I don''t think it''s a bug with VS, because I get the same error (with the messagebox saying it can''t start) whenever I run "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Help\dexplore.exe", this is the file used to view all .hxs format help files. I believe it is a .Net framework executable. This leads me to believe that there is something in my .NET install that is wrong, but I also re-installed THAT, so now I''m at a loss as to why this won''t work.

Ok, my problem was solved! A trip to the Microsoft Knowledge Base offered 6 solutions to my problem... it took me till the 6th one to get it right, figures eh?

i hate that. and then sometimes you think to yourself, well, there are a million solutions and knowing my luck, it will be the last, so we''ll start at the end! YEAH! and it turns out to be the first