I've reinstalled Windows XP 5 times in the past 2 days. Everything installs perfectly fine EXCEPT Visual Studio 6 Enterprise...which is all I really care about. I've done the reformat/reinstall procedure many times before with this exact computer setup, this exact windows cd, and this exact Visual Studio CD. I then got a friend's copy of it to try it thinking maybe it was my Visual Studio cd. Exact same error. The error occurs at the end of installation when it's updating the system and it says: vaesa.dll was unable to register itself in the system registry. autprx32.dll was unable to register itself in the system registry. NLHtml.Dll was unable to register itself in the system registry. picclp32.ocx was unable to register itself in the system registry. And then setup gives an error stating that it failed to install. What the hell is going on? I desperately need to finish a project for work and I can't install visual studio and I've tried reinstalling windows and doing windows updates with service packs and everything BEFORE installing Visual Studio and I've reinstalled windows and tried installing Visual Studio before anything else. No matter what I get the same error. Help? I'm desperate.

Umm...have you actually tried RUNNING anything? I got the same stuff when I installed VC6 on my friends machine yesterday and it runs, compiles, etc fine. As long as you don't need those dlls you're great.

Have you tried manually registering them before installing VS6 ? You will probably have to extract the problem files from a CAB file to C:\Windows\System32, then from a Run box type, (e.g.) regsvr32.exe "C:\Windows\System32\vaesa.dll", then press OK. Repeat this for each of the DLL/OCX's you are having trouble with, then install Visual Studio 6.0.

Check out this page, I think about half way down is a section title install error 1904, show's you how to register your Dll's (sounds like the problem your having). http://frontline.compuware.com/nashua/faq/boundschecker_install.htm