Well...here is 5 days of my life that I can't get back.

The Setup...

For a variety of reasons, I'm having to develop on Vista.  Hold the grief...sometimes you have to do what you have to do.  Additionally, I need to get IIS installed so that I can get the SharePoint extensions for Visual Studio 2008 working...

The Problem...

IIS will not install.  Either through the control panel or by command line.  The Control Panel installation returns back a dialog box that says "An error has occurred.  Not all of the features were successfully installed".  Zero help.

From a DOS box at the command line, nothing comes back when the process is finished (about an hour's time).  However, immediately after the command line comes back, typing "echo %errorlevel%" returns an error code of -2147317563.  That error code translates to something like "TYPE_E_SIZETOOBIG".  What???

The Research...

Well...there is not a lot of help.  Apparently this should not happen because no one/no where that I looked at had anything similar.  Being the geek that I am, the -2147317563 error code can also be represented as 0x800288C5.  This lead me to a post by someone trying to install MSMQ.  What he (apparently) got from Microsoft was that the installation process goes to the Manifest directory and reads all the manifests.  I don't know what that means...but when this process gets beyond 64K (however it does that), the error occurs. 

The post mentioned that he was not able to install or uninstall anything (I think specifically the stuff found in Windows Features) because of this error.  Additionally, he mentioned that the error occurred after he did a Microsoft Update and got all the various language packs.  He also mentioned that there was an open issue ticket thing with Microsoft.  There was no additional information or resolution posted. 

The Solution...

Having nothing to lose, and having spent a week trying to get IIS to install, I figured why not.  I also had all the language packs as I had let Microsoft Update have it's way with the new system I had to work with.  So I went to Regional and Language Options/Keyboards and Languages/Install/uninstall languages and uninstalled everything but English.

I went back to the command line and started the IIS install process and BAM...we are working.  I probably could have done the installation from the control panel, but I wanted to check the errorlevel after each step.  Just for posterity, here are the 5 steps I used to install IIS:

1)
start /w pkgmgr /iu:IIS-WebServerRole;WAS-WindowsActivationService;WAS-ProcessModel;WAS-NetFxEnvironment;WAS-ConfigurationAPI;

2)
start /w pkgmgr /iu:IIS-WebServerRole;IIS-WebServer;IIS-CommonHttpFeatures;IIS-StaticContent;IIS-DefaultDocument;IIS-DirectoryBrowsing;IIS-HttpErrors;IIS-HttpRedirect;

3)
start /w pkgmgr /iu:IIS-ApplicationDevelopment;IIS-ASPNET;IIS-NetFxExtensibility;IIS-ASP;IIS-CGI;IIS-ISAPIExtensions;IIS-ISAPIFilter;IIS-ServerSideIncludes;IIS-HealthAndDiagnostics;IIS-HttpLogging;IIS-LoggingLibraries;IIS-RequestMonitor;IIS-HttpTracing;IIS-CustomLogging;IIS-ODBCLogging;IIS-Security;IIS-BasicAuthentication;

4)
start /w pkgmgr /iu:IIS-WindowsAuthentication;IIS-DigestAuthentication;IIS-ClientCertificateMappingAuthentication;IIS-IISCertificateMappingAuthentication;IIS-URLAuthorization;IIS-RequestFiltering;IIS-IPSecurity;

5)
start /w pkgmgr /iu:IIS-Performance;IIS-HttpCompressionStatic;IIS-HttpCompressionDynamic;IIS-WebServerManagementTools;IIS-ManagementConsole;IIS-ManagementScriptingTools;IIS-ManagementService;IIS-IIS6ManagementCompatibility;IIS-Metabase;IIS-WMICompatibility;IIS-LegacyScripts;IIS-LegacySnapIn;IIS-FTPPublishingService;IIS-FTPServer;IIS-FTPManagement;