Oy vey Microsoft made it a huge pain-in-the-butt to install a newer version of Visual Studio!

It took me no less than 5 hours of my day to uninstall the previous (beta) version (a long, multi-step process), do a boatload of manual cleanup, troubleshoot no fewer than 5 errors with the install of the new version, and then actually install the new version.

There’s a guy named Aaron Stebner who has a complied a great deal of information on the unintall/reinstall process. Below I’ve linked to each of his articles that I had to reference throughout the day. I recommend that you start with the first and go from there.

I would add one other tip – if you’re getting the “HRESULT 0×80131532″ when installing the new version, try going into Add/Remove programs and choosing “uninstall” for “Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.” The program will then ask if you want to uninstall of if you want to “repair.” Choose “repair” – that seemed to fix the problem for me.

Be forewarned that while the uninstall program for version 2.0 of .NET offers a “repair” option, the uninstall for version 1.1 does not – which means that if you choose this option, it really will uninstall the whole thing.

Good Luck.