After the laborious process of uninstalling all of a prior .NET 2.0 beta, and then installing SQL Server 2005 on one of my dev machines, now the Visual Studio 2003 install (which of course utilizes .NET 1.1) is spitting up with an automation error, refusing to run. So now I'm stuck with repairing that install, unsure what exactly is causing the issue (I didn't install Reporting Services, so why this impacted Visual Studio 2003 is a mystery to me). [UPDATE: A repair did nothing, and there are no google hits that describe the same symptom, so now it's a full uninstall and reinstall. A quick project I wanted to bang off in the small amount of time available has already had most of the available time eaten by this sort of issue]

I appreciate that I should try betas on virtual machines, and often I do, but maintaining and configuring virtual machines is a time consuming process, and for some installs I expect there to be some level of side-by-side capabilities. I never had a problem with any of the prior betas of VS.NET 2005, or SQL Server 2005, so who knows.