Some time ago, Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 was released. It weighs in at about 430MB of data, and depending on the installed features, may take more than one hour to install on a decent machine.
This, by itself, may be annoying, but not actually a show stopper. What is really mean is the slack that the Windows Installer leaves on your harddisk after installing a patch that large. You might want to take a look at the directory Installer in the Windows directory. After installing the service pack, the Windows Installer “backs up” easily 1GB of data there. So, for clean installations, anybody who is not into masochism might want to slipstream the patch data into the installer.
There is a nice post at the MSDN blog site on how to do that here.
One might wonder why the Windows Installer behaves that way, and obviously, it does that to support re-configuration of the installed software package. The simplest method to do that seems to be this one, but one wonders if there is no better way to handle this. At least, there is no better way to clutter your system drive with data you are most likely never going to need. Over and out from someone with a 4GB sized Installer directory.