Possible problem launching Visual Studio 2008 setup within a Parallels 3.0 virtual image on a Mac

I heard of an interesting issue from a customer today via the email contact form on my blog, and I wanted to post it here in case anyone else runs into a similar issue.  They saw a problem when launching Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 setup on a virtual Windows image that is running in Parallels 3.0 on a Mac.  In this configuration, VS 2008 setup failed during the initial load with an error like the following:

"A problem has been encountered while loading the setup components. Canceling setup"

In order to workaround the issue, the customer disabled DirectX support in the virtual machine settings in Parallels 3.0 and then re-opened the Windows image and re-ran VS 2008 setup.

If you run into a similar issue running VS 2008 setup in a Windows image in Parallels 3.0, I encourage you to try out this workaround and hopefully it will be useful for you as well.

Also, please note that since the same setup executable is used for the .NET Framework 3.0, the .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2008, this issue could affect all of these products and the workaround may be equally useful for all of these types of installations.