Occasionally we find a neat application that we would like to install, only to find out that it requires the presense of the Microsoft® .NET Framework. One such application I wanted to install was FileHippo.com Update Checker. It's only a 149kb download, but it does a great job of finding updates for applications and drivers installed on your computer. I had it installed on one computer, but it wouldn't work on another because Microsoft® .NET Framework wasn't installed on that computer. I had previously tried to install the .NET Framework on that computer, but it always ended with an installation error. I gave up trying and kind of forgot about it until I wanted to get FileHippo Update Checker installed. Here is the solution I finally found for getting Microsoft® .NET Framework installed.

    Apparently I had a corrupted previous installation of Microsoft® .NET Framework. Everytime I tried to re-install the .NET Framework, it would end up with an installation error. Even after using Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs to uninstall the old .NET Framework, apparently there were still remnants of it in the registry preventing a clean new installation. I found the solution from Aaron Stebner at:
http://astebner.sts.winisp.net/Tools/dotnetfx_cleanup_tool.zip

    Downloading this tool, unzipping it, and running the tool apparently removed the remnants of the previous failed installations of the Microsoft® .NET Framework. The latest version of the Microsoft® .NET Framework is 3.5 and after running Aaron Stebner's tool it installed successfully.