Alright, so I don't know what I was doing exactly.. but paying attention to the install was not it. I somehow installed Visual Studio's C++ remote debugger, with out having installed Visual Studio.

Now when I try to install Visual, I can't get it to install because it detects components of visual studio on the system and asks me to restart and if i click cancel, the installer closes.

The only instructions I can find on unistalling this remote component is to unistall Visual Studio .NET... which I don't have installed.

Don't really have a clue on what to do. Wondering if I should try and install the remote component again and find a program that will track the files installed/created during that set up. Then delete those files.

I'd really like to be able to do my cs 153 homework in my room and don't want to have to re-format.. Suggestions??

Sounds like a problem I had with office.
Ms Office interrupted any installer that relied on office components. Stating that an install of office was still in progress
So to solve the problem I turned to the dreaded search engine on Microsoft’s web site. And to my surprise my problem was a documented issue and to solve it I had to edit the registry

I thought about looking into the registry.. but since I have 0 experience but know enough that the registry is a bad area to play around in.. I thought I'd leave it alone.. I'll look into it..

have you checked the microsoft help database