Here's what greeted me today after attempting to install Orcas Beta 1 on my machine:

<sigh>

I was expecting this to happen. Most likely the issue here is that I had the preview release installed on this box as well and there are likely some left over items that are causing the setup to fail. I was careful to read the install instructions and remove the previous install in the recommended order (although I didn't have half of the components on the list installed) and all of the related components, but even after double checking, rebooting and retrying I still get the same result here.

Actually as soon as the setup gets going I get a MessageBox dialog popping up almost immediately after the install starts:

The installer then goes on processing for about 10 minutes before the above dialog pops up. Incidentally the error report says that it failed due to the invalid parameter.... uh, it would have been nice to fail right there instead of making me wait for 10 minutes.

I guess it's back to beta hell where one install of a preview is all you get before you can throw away your OS install. Fun, fun, fun...

FWIW I've been working with the Orcas preview for a few weeks mainly for checking into LINQ support and playing around with the ASP.NET editor and while there were a lot of major problems with functionality (like missing project properties) overall using of Orcas was a much more pleasant experience than any of the VS 2005 previews or early betas.

I guess I'll be back to VPCs for a while - hate that...