I just tried installing SQL Server 2008 and kept getting an error during the setup support rules phase of the install. It was insistent that my machine needed a reboot, after rebooting a few times I was pretty sure it didn’t really need a reboot.
After a little bit of trawling around I found this thread on the MSDN forums. Basically navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager” and delete any values in “PendingFileRenameOperations”.
Thanks to the post from Tomas Leung for that, I can now install SQL Server 2008.
