Overnight, my two posts about MSN Desktop Search were picked up by Scoble (here and here), and that's always a good thing. Not only did I get a lot of extra traffic (already - it's only been seven hours, all overnight!), but I got a solution out of it. The indexing is running right now.

To get it installed you have to do two things from the command line. First, extract the files using this command:

MSNToolbarSuiteSetup_en-us.exe /c /t:<path>

where path is a path to extract the setup files to. Then go into that folder, and run this command:

msiexec /i <path>MsnToolbarSuite.msi TBSDEVCODE=1

where path is the path used above. Once I did that, it worked fine, and now the indexing is running.

Normally, such a complicated install method would be unacceptable. Could my grandma do this? No. On the other hand, my grandma wouldn't be using Windows Server 2003, so it's no big deal that you have to do this to install it.