Possible cause of Visual Web Designer tools failure during VS Orcas beta 1 setup

As described in this post on S. Somasegar's blog and in other places, Visual Studio codename Orcas beta 1 was recently released.  Some customers (such as in this forum post) have reported that Orcas beta 1 setup is failing on their system while it tries to install the Microsoft Web Designer Tools component.

There is a known issue where the Microsoft Web Designer Tools component will fail if you attempt to install it on a system that has a beta version of Microsoft Office 2007 installed.  This component is produced by the Office team, and the setup wrapper for the component has logic in it to block if it detects beta versions of Office 2007 on the system.  Unfortunately, since Visual Studio setup launches the Web Designer Tools setup in silent mode, the error message only appears in the log file instead of in the UI.

To diagnose this issue, you can look at the Web Designer Tools log file, which is located at %temp%\SetupExe(########).log (where ####### is a unique value with date/time information and a randomly generated ending).  If you attempt to install on a system that has a beta version of Office 2007 installed, there will be an error that looks like the following:

Not showing message because suppress modal has been set. Title: 'Setup Errors', Message: 'Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):

The 2007 Microsoft Office system does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of the 2007 Microsoft Office system products and associated technologies.

Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.

In order to resolve this issue, you can uninstall any remaining beta versions of Office 2007 from your system using the Add/Remove Programs control panel and then re-run Visual Studio Orcas beta 1 setup.  If you do not see any beta versions of Office 2007 in your Add/Remove Programs control panel, you can use steps like the ones listed in this blog post to locate and uninstall the beta components.  All Office 2007 components have the string 0FF1CE at the end of the product code GUID, so you can search for that string to locate these components in the output from the MSI inventory tool.  When you do this, just make sure that you do not inadvertantly uninstall the final release of Office 2007.  If in doubt, you can tell from the product name whether or not the product in question is a beta or the final release.