安装VS2003时，"Setup Has Detected That Another Program Requires the Computer to Reboot"问题的解决方案

From: http://www.knowdotnet.com/articles/setuprequiresrebootandnohelp.html

Setup Has Detected That Another Program Requires the Computer to Reboot When Trying to Install Visual Studio .NET (or other programs) by Les Smith

Have you ever seen the message, "Setup Has Detected That Another Program Requires the Computer to Reboot", and after rebooting you get the same message again and again?  This article will give you a probable solution.

Recently, I was attempting to install Visual Studio .NET (2003) on a new laptop.  I had already installed 2001 and Beta2 of 2005 and while attempting to install 2003, I received the message that is the title of this article.  Several reboot attempts resulted in the same error and it appeared that I was not going to install 2003 .NET!  Since the hard drive of my older laptop was rapidly disentegrating, I began to get in a panic.  Finally Google took me to an article like the one at Microsoft.  The following paragraph comes from the Microsoft page.

When you run a Setup program to install any application, Setup may try to update some files that your operating system is currently using. For example, Setup may try to rename or to delete these files. If Setup cannot update these files, Setup sets the PendingFileRenameOperations registry entry to a non-empty value. You must manually restart your computer to update the files that your operating system was using during the installation process.  If you do not restart your computer, these files are not updated. If you then try to install another application (such as Visual Studio .NET), Microsoft Windows Installer determines that the PendingFileRenameOperations registry entry is not empty. Therefore, you receive the error message that appears in the "Symptoms" section of this article.

Instead of renaming the PendingFileRenameOperations registry entry, I simply deleted it, since I had already rebooted several times and whatever program was supposed to clean up the entry obviously was not going to do it.

Once the registry entry was gone, my problem was solved!  When encountering a problem that you can't solve, try searching both Microsoft and Google (which led me to Microsoft).  Both have saved me much stress.