Hi all
I am in day 3 of trying to solve problems related to installation/reinstallation issues of vs6 components and SP3. From postings here, researching newsgroup, researching MS KB and MSDN I find I do need HELP FROM MICROSOFT.
To be effective in getting this help, I will have to spend 4 hours or so composing the full story complete with error messages and steps taken to date.
I have tried Microsoft Australia but would you believe, as advised by MS, They do not have a SINGLE engineer for any developers product in Australia and therefore would email my problems to USA where the turnaround time will be a MINIMUM of 48 hours and I must lodge $150.00 to MS's credit before they would email such a request. I acknowledge Ms's way of doing business and would gladly pay more if i could get an outcome (my daily worth is a bit more than that amount).However I have done nothing to damage the products that I have and the eventual resolution will prove to be more at the "macro Latent Defect Level" of product interactions. I have seen enough from microsoft newsgroups to know that at least some if not all developers will not be able to reinstall SP3 following a reinstallation of VS6. (I reinstalled VS6 because I suspect a "sequencing problem" if interdev6 is installed before NT option Pack.) In any case there are probaly many reasons why a developer would choose to reinstall VFP6 and expect to then reinstall SP3 -this cannot be done!

Getting to the question - has anyone been able to get help from Microsoft. If so how did you do it ?
tia and thanks for reading this far
John Harriss