I suddenly started to get the error "Cannot find one or more components. Please reinstall the application" when attempting to run Visual Studio 2008.
VS2008 had run without problems since I installed it some months ago.
I removed VS2008 and re-installed it. During the installation the "Cannot find one or more components..." error popped up several times, although the installation appeared otherwise successful.
VS2008 would still not run - same error.
Long story short, after using depends.exe to check which DLLs devenv.exe was loading (or trying to load), the issue turned out to be a DLL that had gone missing; specifically atl90.dll