I set the machine back to April now. I have also removed McAfee, which I saw was interfering with my downloads and my installations. However, I still get the same message, saying it's an INVALID INSTALL PACKAGE. I am going to go as simple as I can on thsi and go down to a VS 2010 Professional installation and see if that will take. This laptop uses an i7 CPU. It has 8 GB of RAM, but it is useless if I can't install Visual Studio.
Cecil

>You might want to set the date on your machine back about a year and then try the install again.
Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has put dependencies in their installers of late (VS2010 Service Pack 1 for sure) that are date dependent on other files that they may or may not be able to find. In the event of a problem, you get the inval file errors on the setup file.

>I went through this for a couple of weeks trying to get Service Pack 1 installed on one particular VS2010 machine - finally someone sresetting the date. Worked like a charm.