current work
Installation of Visual Studio 2003 Help.
I had some problems with my dev machine recently. I had previously installed Visual Studio 2005 Beta and that worked fine, but I no longer had access to the MSDN Library from within Visual Studio 2003. And the MSDN "Document Explorer" which comes with the library also claimed there was no help available.
That was a real pain, so I tried:
Reinstall MSDN Library - no online help
Uninstall and reinstall MSDN library - still no online help
Uninstall Visual Studio 2005, uninstall MSDN Library, reinstall MSDN Library - still no online help.
My next step would have been to uninstall and reinstall Visual Studio 2003, but that seemed just too daunting, so I tried reregistering the MSHELP 2 DLL with the following command:
regsvr32 "D:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Help\hxds.dll"
Then I started the Document Explorer, and was greeted with the following message box:
"Help is updating to reflect your recent changes. This may take several minutes."
It did take a minute or two, but then lo' and behold the Document Explorer had access to the help index again, RELIEF! So I started Visual Studio 2003 again, and tried F1 to access dynamic help, and YES, everything was fine again.
Hope this information helps you,
- Richard