Sometimes I hate Microsoft. OK, so MS had a ton of problems with people overwhelming their servers with downloading the Office Beta 1 Technical Refresh. So this time around, they deployed an alternate solution to downloading Office 2007 Beta 2. It's called SmartSource, and it's built by some company that hardly anyone has ever heard of before.
SmartSource is built on .NET 1.1, which is totally stupid in and of itself, because Office 2007 relies on .NET 2.0, and Vista has it preinstalled. It's further stupid because the default .NET 1.1 runtime does not install on Vista, it throws compatibility errors. I'm presuming there will be an updated release that will work at some point, but right now there is not.
But the lack of foresight goes one step further, because even when you use Windows XP Service Pack 2 compatibility mode, and run the installer as an Administrator, the package installs, but the application throws an unhandled expection (error). When you try to add standard .NET compatibility tags to the application config file (to make it run on .NET 2.0, which should have been in there in the first place), it still doesn't run.
So, when you're registering for the Beta 2 downloads (And you're running any Vista build), don't click the "Continue" button once you get your product keys. Instead, click on the name of the app, which is also a hyperlink, and download it that way.
If Microsoft had kept us in the loop and released it to their trusted testers before general availability, we could have worked with them to make sure that this didn't happen. But at the end of the day, why Microsoft didn't test the experience themselves on Vista builds is beyond me.
<smacks forehead>