Turns out it’s a good idea to do it once in a while. Cleaner installs, availability of new and improved drivers, more thoughtful selection and placement of applications.
This time it was caused by my rush into SQL 2011, which is still at CTP1 level, and accompanying documentation, though warning you about certain things, is not readily available when making a decision of what to load and what to skip. In my case it completely broke BIDS for SQL2K8R2. After a day and a half of struggling with attempts to repair and/or reinstall the latter, – I realized it would take me longer than just to reload everything clean.
I also wanted to re-introduce RAID on my drives (2 Hitachi’s), which of course requires a full reload.
Well, 8 hours later I have a much faster system, with everything I need!
