Trying to repair or uninstall VS2008 gives an error message “A problem has been encountered while loading the setup components. Cancelling setup”

If launching VS2008 Maintenance Mode is showing the following error dialog “A problem has been encountered while loading the setup components. Cancelling setup” please check out this article written by Heath (DTG team member) https://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2008/10/06/adding-features-to-visual-studio-2008-may-fail-to-load-setup-components.aspx

Please make sure you start VS setup from Add/Remove Programs (ARP) instead of your DVD, this is because the patch to fix the issue will update the cached version of the setup files on your machine, the original media will not contain the fix and therefore will continue pop up the error message.