Problems with Visual Studio Express installation

Question

I just installed 'Visual C# 2008 Express Edition' and 'Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition' on my Vista machine. Previously I have been running these in Win XP. When launching the software, starting a new project and trying to build it I get warnings like "The referenced component 'System' could not be found."; one row for each namespace used. I have .NET Framework 3.5 installed and are able to browse through the tabs in 'Add reference', but I cannot make it work. (A re-install did not help.) Is there an easy fix?

Answer 1

Problem solved. I used the most radical solution I could come up with - a clean Vista install. Somehow reinstalling Visual Studio does not include all essential steps. First time the software is launched it configures itself. Something must have gone wrong the first time and when the procedure was done again it tried to use to "broken" configuration. Well, now it is fixed.

Answer 2

Are you launching via "Run As Administrator"? It's possible the permissions on your .Net framework directories aren't what they should be.

Answer 3

Do you have any patches or updates that there may be for that software? The other thought would be to copy the System.dll into the bin folder of the project which is what I used to do in previous projects to get things working.

Answer 4

I really didn't want to follow the accepted answer and do a clean install. A better solution I got from the MSDN forums:

Go to Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows Features on or off...

Then enable everything under Microsoft .Net Framework 3.0