Visual Studio 2008 project creation failed error

I’m still running the Windows 7 x64 Release Candidate and so I expect and deal with the occasional operating system bug here and there, but this was more of a Visual Studio 2008 problem. I VS 2008 Professional (after getting it free from school) a couple of weeks ago and needed to code a console app in C++. Upon choosing the new project option I was left with no new project and just a tiny message at the bottom of the VS status bar stating “Project Creation Failed…” Here’s how I fixed it.

There are several articles I found online which talked about the same problem and some of them had most of the steps needed to resolve the problem. For me though there were a few additional and strange things I did to get VS wizard to finally work in Windows 7 RC1.
[step 1] Found at Developer’s Point (not sure if it’s really needed): Register the VsWizard.dll file in a command prompt opened with administrator privileges.

C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0Common7IDE>
regsvr32 vswizard.dll

[step 2] Open regedit with administrator privileges and search for “VsWizard”. You’ll get some results, but the ones you really look like this:

VsWizard.VsWizardEngine.9.0

Each corrupted VsWizard.xxx key on my system also had a subkey called CLSID. There were like 4 or 5 of them if I remember right. Clicking the CLSID subkey before this fix yielded a permission denied error.

[step 3] Right-click each of these keys, choose Permissions, and replace the owner on these keys. It’ll tell you that it failed, but it actually works. Then ensure that you have the Full Control permission granted to Everyone and SYSTEM applied and replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object.

[step 4] Repeat 3 on all found registry keys.
That did it for me. Cheers to those who initially discovered the individual fixes to this problem.