>I finally got my copy of Visual Studio and started to try to install it. I spent an hour or two clearing off 900MB from one of my partitions (bye, bye "Unreal"). I cleared another 100 MB off my C: drive, then started the install.
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> It immediately complained about a 64K key limit in the registry. Great. So I removed a few more programs, and deleted a bunch of old entries from the SharedDLL key. Tried installing again, same message. I decide to try it anyways, and I shortened the install directories to E:\VS\Cmn. Finally loaded everything and rebooted the computer - I got like 10 error messages RE: dll's. Guess I didn't clear out enough.
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> I repeated this about 4 times. Each time I removed a little more from the registry. I even changed 30-40 entries from their long file names to the 8 character versions ("Program Files" became "PROGRA~2"). Still no luck. Everything works except C++. How on earth is everyone getting all this stuff to install? It looks like just this one program takes a lot of registry space. What a stupid problem.
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> Does Win98 or NT4.0 have the same 64K limitation?

I haven't had nearly the problems you've had installing under NT; I installed everything, including the full 3 CD MSDN content (less the samples) to my NT Server box; the entire install, including 800+MB of MSDN, ate about 1.1GB. NT's registry is now around 10MB, grown by about 4MB from it's previous size. No complaints about key sizes.