I’ve had this issue pop up a few times now on machines where, when you attempt to install a program you will get a “blah blah is missing MSVCR80.dll file” and the install will fail out. It was a vexxing problem because these were fresh Windows installations, completely patched and up to date. Nothing was running in the background.
Finally, doing some google search on revealed something interesting. Windows Defender sometimes breaks Net 2.0. Atleast, thats how it appears. If a machine has Defender installed, and you get said error, uninstall Defender. Disabling it doesnt fix the issue, but uninstalling will.
Good job Microsoft. Funny how this problem didn’t exist in the betas.