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My parallels windows vm died (and then I learned about snapshots).  I needed to do some SQL related work, so I tried to install SQL Server 2005 so I could use the studio to run/write sql.
The installation of the client tools would always fail with the message that the version of SQL server that I already had installed was newer than the edition that I was trying to install.  
I had installed Visual Studio 2008 beforehand, and this was the problem.  To fix the problem, I ended up uninstalling anything related to SQL Server 2005, then running my install.