Another version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 has been detected on this system that must be updated to SP1. Please update all Visual Studio 2008 installations to SP1 level, by visiting Microsoft Update.

SQL 2K8 R2 installation fails with Visual Studio error even I don’t have VS installed at all on my machine!!!

I have encountered an interesting and time consuming issue last week. I was trying to install SQL 2k8 R2 on one of my servers. Installation went fine upto some extent, it installed DB Engine and other stuff but while installing “SQL Server Client Tools” it failed throwing below error:

“Another version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 has been detected on this system that must be updated to SP1.  Please update all Visual Studio 2008 installations to SP1 level, by visiting Microsoft Update.”

I noticed “Visual Studio 2008 Shell Isolated Mode Redistributable” was installed on machine and noticed it was already updated to SP1. I re-installed this one also from this link. Now I tried installing SQL Server Client Tools again but I received the same above error.

Then I found solution in this MSDN post. We need to make some changes to registry in order to proceed with SQL installation as mentioned below.

If you have a 64-bits computer, you need to check the following registry keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DevDiv\VC\Servicing\9.0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DevDiv\VC\Servicing\9.0\RED\1033

and ensure that the SP and SPIndex values are 1 and that the SPName is SP1

also we need to make changes to following registry keys:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\DevDiv\VS\Servicing\9.0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\DevDiv\VS\Servicing\9.0\VSR\1033

ensure that the SP and SPIndex values are 1 and SPName value is SP1. The SP and SPIndex values were 0 and the SPName was RTM on my machine. I changed them to 1 and SP1 respectively and then tried installing client tools and installation went successfully.

Thanks