Just two days ago, I installed XNA Game Studio Express Beta 1 on my evaluation copy of Windows Vista RC2. Apart from the project templates, everything worked smoothly. Now Beta 2 is out and makes everything harder 
To get XNA Game Studio Express Beta 2 installed in Windows Vista, follow these steps:
- Uninstall XNA Game Studio Express Beta 1 if you had it installed on your system.
- Install Visual C# Express 2005
- Install Visual C# Express 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta 1
- Install the DirectX October 2005 SDK
- Install XNA Game Studio Express Beta 2
VC# Express 2005 SP1 should fix the issue about the setup assistant failing to register the project templates. If it still would fail, after you acknowledge the error message, a rollback would be performed, removing all installed files again.
The next problem will be that you XNA projects will not compile anymore. The workaround here is to create a normal Windows Application project and add references to the XNA assemblies and your code files from the XNA project there.
November 14th, 2006 at 10:02 am
[…] Instaling XNA Beta 2 on Windows Vista? Here’s some tips from Markus. He’s also working on a game in XNA, which is integrating Farseer. […]