[[if you’ve stumbled onto this trying to get the Win7 SDK installed, skip to the bottom]]

When I got my new laptop, I needed to get ispell setup for spell checking in Emacs. ispell itself on Windows is a wash, but I know aspell and hunspell can work. aspell can be had from Cygwin, which is great! Except that in September something was wrong with it/the mirror I chose, and it wouldn’t install. I got it a few weeks ago and all is well, but before that, I tried to get hunspell working.

Now, the instructions for Unix-based systems are pretty simple. Less so for Windows. I tried the 2.1 compilation instructions, for installing and running through Cygwin. Didn’t work for me (at the time, haven’t tried recently). The 2.2 installation was no better. So, off I went to try and get the Win7 SDK. I hoped that would be easier than futzing around with Cygwin

I was wrong.

I got two different errors (the numbers for which I’ve lost, sadly), and Microsoft’s help was no use. After a couple of solutions that “worked for this author”, including one involving registry editing, I finally found the problem.

My computer came pre-installed with a higher version of .NET and Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable than the ones in the SDK.

So, uninstall those, run the SDK installer, and then check Windows Update to get the newest versions back.

Anyway, this isn’t terribly useful without the exact error codes. But I don’t really feel like replicating the errors now that I have it working! It’s all a moot point now that I got aspell installed, but there you go. Just in case I ever need to install the SDK again, or someone else needs to.