I was installing Visual Studio 2008 sp1 on my fresh installation of Windows 7 RC, when my installation failed with an "Operation Aborted" message, and there's a strong chance that almost everyone trying to install VS 2008 sp1 on a X86 machine would encounter it. I found on stackoverflow that deleting the following key - HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions or other equivalent methods like renaming the key works like a cinch.

It seems to be the same "SQM bug" discovered by Rafael Rivera and reported by multiple bloggers including Paul Thurrott. And I'd agree with him that claiming "Machine Throttling" is causing the failure is a bit of a stretch, as I noticed that I didn't had "MachineThrottling" under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions. So although WinSqmStartSession() in ntdll.dll did crash on my system it didn't happen because MachineThrottling was enabled in the registry.