VS2008 SP1 - When NOT to install..

So I'm sitting here in southern California making some final preparations for my talk this evening at the South Bay .NET UG.  I ran into a wacky scenario where my event handlers for my silverlight components weren't firing.. So after verifying it wasn't just a silly coding error (which I'm certainly not immune to) I decided to 'clean up' my dev environment.  I had installed the IE8 beta the other day, so I started by uninstalling that.  I was also running on one of the pre-release Silverlight 2 Beta 2 builds, so I figured this would be a good time to bump up to the actual bits. 

I ran the uninstall, and downloaded the new chainer.  BTW, 86mb feels like you're downloading the whole world when you're running off of Hotel wifi.  So with my 86mb chainer downloaded, I ran the installer.. That's when everything went wrong.

The new Silverlight 2 Beta 2 installer has a prereq for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (which was JUST released).  I hadn't yet installed VS2008 SP1, and was still running one of the final SP1 beta's.  So of course, I had to first uninstall the SP1 beta.  If it were only that easy.. the removal tool requires that you have the original VS2008 install media handy, which of course I did not.  I finally convinced a co-worker to share a cdrom with the bits on it back at the office, and I connected via VPN. 

Sounds like a success, right?  Wrong.  This has got to be the slowest install/uninstall I've ever experienced.  I'm sure working off of crummy wifi and through a VPN network share isn't helping..  At this point, I'm just hoping I have a functioning Visual Studio for this evening - forget about the last minute tweaks to my code..

The moral of the story is - don't decide to install or uninstall software while on the road, especially when you don't have access to a high speed internet connection.  You never know what 'chain' of events you may have just started.