  Earlier this week, I installed Virtual PC onto my main PC at home. The intention (as described in my urlLink www.mydemos.com blog) is to have a separate environment where I can install fresh copies of every cool Microsoft development tool I can get my dirty hands on. My current home PC has had so many installs and uninstalls, that I would prefer to be working in a clean environment. So I installed Virtual PC (Trial Edition). Two days later, urlLink my hard drive crashed . It was no big deal, since Virtual PC was the only software installed on the entire drive. I got a new hard drive and thought I could just start over. Of course, what was a bigger deal was reinstalling Virtual PC. The installed program refused to install it a second time, instead attempting to uninstall it. Since the program directory is gone, the uninstall fails. Can't install. Can't uninstall. Great. Solution? Go into the Windows registry and manually delete all references to Virtual PC.
Once I did that, it installed. Next challenge was installing an operating system into the new virtual space. It took me hours (no kidding) to figure out how to get Windows XP Professional to install there. Think of it like this. There is NO OS. Nothing but a blank C: drive. So I get a DOS boot floppy disk. But wait, DOS doesn't recognize the CD-ROM. OK, I get a DOS boot disk that recognizes the CD-ROM, but it doesn't recognize the C: drive. Perhaps C: is formatted NTFS, so I get a boot disk that recognizes NTFS. No dice, it's formatted FAT32. So I get another boot disk that recognizes both the CDROM and FAT32. Great, now the SETUP.EXE for the Windows XP CD won't run - "can't be run in DOS mode".
Geez, Windows XP!!! What the HECK do you want from me? Now I finally got past that issue, and it is taking HOURS for Windows XP to install. Copying files... I'm just about ready to give up. Something is wrong. So the first surprise of this experience is that it's taken me 24 hours to get from installing Virtual PC to the "Copying Files" part of Windows XP setup. 
