Sunday was a rather eventful day for me. Aside from nursing a rather light hangover from the previous night’s festivities, my day was devoted to a rather interesting encounter with my computer hanging itself.  No, it didn’t try to commit suicide, however, it did force my hand on reinstalling the Windows 7 Professional that had previously installed with no hiccups. While I’m not at all certain as to the cause of the hang, my assumptions revolve around running two IDEs while modifying a single file … and a ninja update that happened while I had both IDEs open during a Microsoft Security Essentials Scan … oh, and I turned off the computer because everything had apparently froze when I tried to close out Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional. Far fetched, however, Microsoft is notorious for having the weirdest glitches.

2100 Sunday evening was my deadline for the homework that I needed to turn in for my C/C++ Programming I course. So, at 1900, when several attempts to run the Startup Repair and System Restore utilities both failed to grant me entry into my Windows 7 Professional box, I made the decision to reinstall the operating system and applications.  2030 arrives and I’m finished installing the operating system and by 2100 Ninite has installed all my preferred open source applications.  I also had Visual Studio 2008 Professional reinstalled, however, I ignored a particular error because it didn’t seem as though it would’ve interrupted my ability to get my homework turned in … besides, I ran a repair and it indicated that nothing was amiss.

So, homework is turned in an hour late. No sweat … a mere 5 points off my perfect score of 100 otherwise. Nice to know that all these years casually reading the books worked out just fine. I turn in afterwards as I let Microsoft Office Home & Student 2007 install – blissfully unaware that my IDE was b0rked.

0800 rolls around and I groggily return my beloved digital companion. Today, I decide to read up on this week’s reading assignments and follow along by inputting the code myself and tweaking with the exercises.  All was going well until I decided to compile the example.  “Error spawning ‘rc.exe’” was the ominous message in my compiler’s output dialog. A quick hop to Google.com revealed to me that somehow I needed to get ‘rc.exe’ into my application search path. “No problem,” I thought to myself, I’ll just search my system and add those directories to my environment … “File rc.exe not found” … great. And then it dawned on me, the install didn’t complete properly.

It’s now 2130, 24-hours since I technically got this system back on its feet and still no Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional. This ominous error with Microsoft SQL Server Compact 3.5 for Devices is still happening and none of the resources on the ‘net has been of any help. The install is currently going on, I finally came to the conclusion that I will attempt to download each package that fails to install and see if that will help at all … here’s to hoping my VS2008pro will work.