Thanks for your reply.I did all that and more, like msiinv en then msizap on anything remotely VS and SS related, but no joy.
Now going for a complete reformat of c: on my development machine and final reinstall. Seems the only way.
I resolved this issue by completely reformatting C:\, reinstalling W2K etc. and subsequently reinstalling VWD and SS. Then all package load failures were gone!
Apparantly this is the only sure way to get rid of uninstall issues on non-English Windows installations that have been "corrupted" by previous VS 8 betas and such.