Windows Phone 7.1 SDK Issues - MonoGame Requirements

I've had massive trouble, recently.  My primary hard drive failed, and then the replacement failed within twelve hours.  Long story short, I needed to rebuild my system's software from the ground up.

Since I've migrated my pet projects to MonoGame, I had some issues trying to get things setup again.  In particular, I kept trying to install the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK due to a dependency on it being needed for MonoGame.

When that occurred, I had the following error when installing (shown in the Error Log):

Windows Phone Emulator x64: *** ERRORLOG EVENT ***: Error: Installation failed for component Windows Phone Emulator x64. MSI returned error code 1603

Very specific, right?  Not.

So, what I ended up doing was downloading the offline installer for Windows Phone 7.1 SDK and navigating to what was important and what I *really* needed -- XNA.  The normal XNA you install apparently won't get the job done.

If you navigate off of the ISO for WP7.1SDK, you'll see a folder structure...

\WCU\WindowsPhone

Inside that, the relevant XNA installer is listed as XNAGS40_Setup.exe.  That's the dependency that MonoGame actually has.

Solved this error fairly quickly:

Error 1 Error loading pipeline assembly "MonoGameContentProcessors, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null".

Now, back to finally doing some development!