I have been plagued with problems when running VS.NET 2003 on clean installs of Win XP. I install under the Administrator account but have a normal user account for running VS.NET in (plus the VS Devs and Debuggers groups). VS will run fine but when accessing the MSDN Library, navigating to a document in the sidebar, then clicking that document, the Installer dialog will pop up and start going on about "Error 1606". I can't remember the exact error message now because it's working. If I clicked "Canel" the help page would successfully come up after some seconds. However that is very frustrating because it comes up for _every_ page I viewed and the whole process can take 30 seconds when hitting Cancel. Not clicking Cancel and letting it run can take minutes. If I run the same task from the Admin account there are no problems

I saw the messages from someone at MS about using RegMon to try to track the problems. That didn't help me but I did finally get around to looking in the OS Event - Application log. There are about 10 errrors but the most important looks like this
"Detection of product '{E05F0409-0E9A-48A1-AC04-E35E3033604A}', feature 'dotNET_Framework_SDK', component '{C9AF9050-C8BE-11D1-9C67-0000F81F1B38}' failed.  The resource 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Common\UserData' does not exist.

Using Regedit.exe I pulled up that area of the registry and verified that there was no UserData there. When I checked under the Admin account it was. So in "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Common\" I created a new DWord entry with the title "UserData" and changed the value from 0 to 1. I also exported these values from the Admin account and imported them into my user account
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Common\UserInfo
"UserInitials"=hex:00,0
"UserName"=hex:00,0

Now it seems to work. Fingers crossed