Working through the last revision of the SDK I found it was really hard to discern the development environment for successfully developing a Windows Media Center application -- mainly because you can't read what we write before installing the SDK...!

So, let me take a moment to give you what I consider the bare minimum install set for a development machine in the order they should be installed.

Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate

Visual C# 2005 Express Edition
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=51411

Visual C# 2005 Express Edition SP1
http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/7/3/7737290f-98e8-45bf-9075-85cc6ae34bf1/VS80sp1-KB926749-X86-INTL.exe

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista
http://download.microsoft.com/download/c/7/d/c7d9b927-f4e6-4ab2-8399-79a2d5cdfac9/VS80sp1-KB932232-X86-ENU.exe

Visual C# 2008 Express Edition
http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7729278

Windows Media Center Software Development Kit 5.3
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=a43ea0b7-b85f-4612-aa08-3bf128c5873e

I've put these links over on the navigation bar at http://blog.mediacentersandbox.com as well for future reference.

Charlie