What I usually do when faced with the installation of an RTM version of some software on a machine that's been running earlier beta versions has been to wipe the hard disk and start over from the installation of the Operating System. Yes it takes time but you can be sure that nothing is left hanging around from those earlier installations to possibly mess things up in future.

I would still recommend that method for production machines.

But for test machines it seems that most people are tempted not to do this but to just remove the old version of WSS v3 (and possibly something else) and try again. This kind of thing doesn't have a particularly high success rate - at least judging by the numbers of people reporting problems - so in the true Jerry Pournelle spirit of "I do these (crazy) things so you don't have to" I've been trying a few such scenarios myself.

At first I wondered what all the fuss was about. I took a couple of VMs that had been running Beta2 and stripped them of everything I could leaving only VM Tools (and on one of them also leaving something that I hadn't a clue what it was). So I removed WSS then .NET Framework 3.0 then .Net Framework 2.0 and then re-booted before installing .NET Framework 3.0 again (re-boot) and then WSS v3 RTM and everything went like clockwork.

[Note that these were all single server installations using what used to be called  "embedded SQL Server 2005 Express (Windows)" but which is now called the "Windows Internal Database".]

So why were people getting problems?

I tried again on a third machine and this time when I went back to the VM there was no sign of the default page that ought to come up at the end of the installation and I couldn't access it just by specifying it, so something had gone wrong. I then realised I hadn't done any intermediate re-boot this time !

So what to do ? I tried without much hope the Repair possibility for WSS. This went through OK; **required a re-boot**; and then I re-started the configuration wizard (by hand) and this time watched it carefully. It went through OK and then did this time throw up the standard default page.

So obviously there seems to be a need for a re-boot before installing WSSv3 RTM after you have removed whatever was there before. Whether you need both re-boots is something I'll leave to you to look at. My suspiscion is that one re-boot would be enough.

Anyway I'm now going to move on to trying to install SQL Server 2005 (Full) and trying to get a WSS v3 RTM to use that. Once I've done that a few times I might have some feel for that installation too. I have a good SQLServer 2005 book so what can go wrong !?  [Yes, I am more worried about getting the SQL Server 2005 installation right than the WSS part. I've stuck to using SQL Server 2K so far. Wish me luck!!]