Vista Service Pack 2 won't install

Sounds reasonable, should be fine then. Thanks

Ok I apologize for my confusion, but I'm still a bit discombobulated by this whole thing. Forgive my whole newbie view as I am not a tech wiz with computers. AO are you Ztruker saying that the Win 7 upgrade disc will format the c drive and install Win 7 on it? I am asking because I've always used the recovery partition to do reformat the drive and reinstall the opsys. How will the upgrade disc reformat the drive and install Win 7 onto it? How is that possible? And I'm not quite sure whose advice to follow. I appreciate both of your advice though. Should I do the registry workaround or should I try what ao recommended? I'm still not sure what to do. And ao could you give an exact step by step of how I should format the C drive and do a fresh install of Win 7? I'm kind of lost. You may wonder why, but not everyone catches on very quickly to technical things and I'm one of those people. It's like working with a child or an old person. Patience is the key. Thanks for being patient with me.

What Appleoddity said is true. You can format the disc during the install using an upgrade disc. The install code will detect you have qualifying media already installed on your hard drive.

Excellent instructions for doing this here: Clean Install Windows 7