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!