Possible resolution for invalid license data errors after installing Visual Studio 2008

I have heard from a few customers who have installed Visual Studio 2008 and then seen a dialog appear stating "Invalid license data. Reinstall is required." when attempting to launch the IDE.  The dialog looks like the following:

Pressing OK on this dialog dismisses the IDE and VS 2008 is not usable.

There are a couple of cases where registry data can be orphaned on the machine that causes this type of error.  Unfortunately, running a repair of VS 2008 will not correctly fix the registry values that control this functionality in most cases.

The following steps can be used to resolve most instances of this Invalid license data error message:

  1. Uninstall the Visual Studio 2008 product that you have installed.  You only have to uninstall the main Visual Studio product entry in Add or Remove Programs, and you can leave the other pieces installed by Visual Studio setup (such as the .NET Framework 3.5, MSDN, SQL Express, etc) alone.  The product name in Add or Remove Programs that you want to uninstall is dependent on the VS 2008 edition you have installed.  For example, for the English Professional edition, the product name will be "Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional - ENU"
  2. Click on Start, choose Run and type cmd
  3. Copy and paste each of the following commands into the cmd prompt to clean up orphaned Visual Studio licensing data in your registry: reg delete HKCR\Licenses\21B7CDC0-21A6-4fa8-8CE5-F6A6B2B60839 /f
    reg delete HKCR\Licenses\2AC5863D-48B9-490c-ACD3-B7723A1FEB9E /f
    reg delete HKCR\Licenses\45D0AA33-5564-4a89-BE94-C1972EF4658C /f
    reg delete HKCR\Licenses\46D504D7-557F-4C19-A4DD-6605411EF496 /f
    reg delete HKCR\Licenses\743A8267-4958-460e-B757-7110EED3D53C /f
    reg delete HKCR\Licenses\82198EB8-0FAB-4b2b-98AD-F745A8566EFE /f
    reg delete HKCR\Licenses\AEA64E56-7C97-4a1c-8974-4E0BB4E48FCD /f
    reg delete HKCR\Licenses\B2825A63-A482-4032-80E6-42C9D2C1A78B /f
    reg delete HKCR\Licenses\BA32367F-28F8-4AEA-848D-95AE438B3B9C /f
    reg delete HKCR\Licenses\F2E1F428-5B9A-4a69-B1F4-28C3C644168A /f
  4. If you are installing on a 64-bit OS, copy and paste each of the following commands into the cmd prompt to clean up orphaned Visual Studio licensing data in your registry:
  5. Re-install the Visual Studio 2008 product that you uninstalled in step 1 above

After doing this, the license data should be recreated and correct and allow you to launch the VS 2008 IDE.