Fix ‘Install operation did not finish successfully. Please reinstall or repair Visual Studio’ Error After Updating Visual Studio 2015 to Update 3

Hey Guys :) I was updating Visual Studio 2015 recently and after finishing up the update to Visual Studio Update 3 from the web installer, it suggested to restart. After the restart I was not able to start Visual Studio 2015. It kept displaying the error message dialog saying the install operation did not finish successfully. I got the following error message.

I went to Control Panel > Program and Features to try and repair my installation but it could not detect the install location and offered to remove the entry from the Installed program list instead. But Don’t Panic yet, there is still hope.

You need to do some fiddling with the Windows Registry to get this working. Open up Windows Registry Editor by running regedit on the Windows Run dialog. Then go to the following node.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\Setup\VS\<Your_Visual_Studio_Edition>

This edition value can be enterprise, professional or community. In my case its professional so the node looked like this

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\Setup\VS\professional

Here you need to look for an entry called InstallResult If your current value is 3010, change it to 0. Also you should see another entry called IsInstallInProgress. This value should be 0, if the installation did not finish properly your value should likely to be 1. If so change this to 0 as well. So both InstallResult and IsInstallInProgress values should be 0.

After that I tried to start Visual Studio 2015 and it started up just fine like it should :) Yay.. and I went ahead and opened about Visual Studio from Help > About Visual Studio and it showed it to be Visual Studio Professional 2015 Update 3. So the update process was successful and its just that somewhere Visual Studio Updater could not set the IsInstallInProgress value to 0.

That’s basically it falks, Hope this helped you out in this sticky situation. We all know how painful it is to uninstall and reinstall Visual Studio. :D Untill next time.. C ya folks.. :)