Uninstalling the .NET Framework Beta
I had spent a few days on this problem and the paths that I took make it worthwhile to blog! But first, the background...
I basically wanted to install the February CTP of Visual Studio 2005 to try out some new features. I had the December Beta 1 Refresh of VS 2005 and SQL Server 2005 along with the .NET Framework 2.0 Beta. When I uninstalled the existing VS 2005, it worked fine, but after that when I uninstalled the .NET Framework Beta 2.0, the application was immediately removed from Control Panel and I should have suspected this, but did not. Later, when I looked at my folder, I saw the framework directory still there and was puzzled and tried deleting that folder (which was the first mistake). The folder could not be completely deleted and therein started my problem, because, post this, I could neither install the new CTP of VS 2005 or uninstall SQL Server 2005 becuase both of complained that the .NET Framework Beta 2.0 version was incompatible or not present.
I spoke to some folks on how to go about erasing all trails of the framework and initially tried fiddling with the registry, but to no avail. Then, one of my MVP collegues pointed me to his blog. I wish I had seen it earlier, because the methods outlined here assumed that you did not manually remove some files. After some more frustrating moments, I finally landed upon this Microsoft Support Article. Although this article talks about .NET Framework 1.1, the methods outlined apply to 2.0 also. Out of this, the best method that I found (for my initially committed mistakes) was using the MSIZAP utility. This is an utility that you can download from the Windows Installer SDK and it works great. All you have to do is provide the product ID for the product that you want zapped and MSIZAP will remove all trails of it from the registry!!
Post this, things went on fine and I was able to get everything working again. However, now I have a VPC for this as I upped the RAM on my machine and the VPC works great. Nevertheless, remember MSIZAP and the article link and you can get around many framework installation issues.