We ran into the same issue with our Windows 2000 machines.

There is a KB article at:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;824850

This article does not directly address the issue that you and I ran into, but it does help (somewhat).

Note that the article talks about the Prerequisite install not completing and is pretty wrapped up in that issue. It does not address the error we experienced directly. However, the installation of the SOAP 3.0 SDK was a good start. We did the following and had good success:

1. On the VFP8 Setup Disk run the setup.exe in the WCU directory (Windows Component Update install).

2. On the VFP8 Setup Disk run the setup.exe in the Setup directory (vfp install).

Our basic strategy we likened to a rain-dance, but leaving off the nonsense comments, our strategy was to back-door install the components that the Prerequisites HTTP installer was attempting to do.

Hope this helps.

The Platts VFP Team