Installation of Visual Studio 2010 (any edition) installs only 2 files in the C++ headers directory

Question

I installed Visual Studio 2010 Premium on my Windows 7 workstation. After loading a test C++ project, I noticed that it could not locate iostream. I took a look in C:\

Answer 1

The Visual Studio installer is a fickle beast, to put it mildly. The generic diagnostic is that your registry is dirty, having a record of a sub-component of VS installed while it is not actually present anymore. There are a lot of sub-components and an enormous number of registry entries that keep track of their install state and their config. Finding such a dirty key back is a serious needle-in-a-haystack problem.

This kind of registry damage is very common if you ever had a beta or RC edition installed. I never had a beta version that didn't give me an enormous problem getting the RTM version installed. The VS2010 beta went particularly badly for me, albeit that I shot my foot badly by updating to Windows7 without uninstalling the beta. A gigantic mess, to put it mildly. You can expect similar kind of upheaval of you ever had an un/install that didn't complete. And of course registry damage is always around to turn this into misery.

The problem is quite common, there are Visual Studio cleanup tools around that aim to purge the registry after something like this happened. For VS2010 there are actually several. Google "vs2010 uninstall utility" to find them. No idea if they are different someway, no reason I can think of to not just run them all.

Chips are seriously down when that still doesn't fix the problem. Only thing left is to dig through the dd*.txt files that are left in the TEMP directory after an install. They contain a detailed trace of the installer's decisions. Beware that you'll drown in the amount of data.

Answer 2

I ran into this problem on Windows 8.1 when the VS 2010 Web installer failed to install correctly the first time. I followed Kaba's steps above with a slight difference and it solved the problem for me (so kudos to Kaba). The difference is that I deleted all the “VisualStudio\10.0” keys and all its sub-keys, as well as the “VisualStudio\10.0_Config” and sub-keys.

Answer 3

While doing some research on this topic it seems like no matter how you uninstall Visual Studio there are always pieces left behind.

Two options to consider.

Option 1 Install VS 2010 on virtual machine. Zip needed files from your virtual machine. Copy and unzip them over to the workstation.

Option 2 Format hard drive. Install fresh copy of Windows 7. Install fresh copy VS 2010.

Answer 4

I tried several rounds of uninstalling and reinstalling. The hack that finally worked was to copy the entire contents of the VC folder from a machine with a working VS 2010 installation. You probably don't need to copy all of these , but I was missing 3000+ files in include, lib, and other folders within VC.

Answer 5

The solution to this problem is as follows. It is based on the solution given in

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/774158/re-installed-visual-studio-2010-and-c-standard-headers-are-missing

• Uninstall Visual Studio 2010.
• Uninstall Visual Studio 2010 SP1 (despite the warning it gives).
• Open Registry Editor (regedit).
• Search for keys named PaddedVersion
• Remove any parent keys VisualStudio\10.0\VC\Libraries, or similar (note the version number 10.0, which corresponds to 2010). Delete all of these registry paths. The search for the PaddedVersion key is just to ease up this search.
• Install Visual Studio 2010.
• Install Visual Studio 2010 SP1.

This solution may not be minimal, but it works for me. Hopefully others can confirm. The important difference here is that it is not just the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE from which the registry path must be deleted, as indicated in the link above.

Answer 6

The solution at http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/774158/re-installed-visual-studio-2010-and-c-standard-headers-are-missing not worked for me.

After Uninstall Visual Studio 2010 and SP1, I used a registry cleaner software CCleaner and installed again. It fixed.