I was installing WSS 3.0 on Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition and got the following error.

Figure 1.

Clearly WSS 3.0 has issues with Windows Server 2008! Clicking on "Check for solutions online" displays the following screen.

Figure 2.

Clicking "Check online for a solution" takes to the following really helpful (sarcastic) screen.

Figure 3.

At this point I thought I can't install WSS, or MOSS for that matter, on Windows Server 2008! I tried again and this time around I paid more attention to the screens shown.

By default, the bottom portion of the screen shown in Figure 2 is hidden and I missed the detailed error information shown in the bottom portion of the screen. On the second screen, I clicked on "View problem details" and saw the detailed error information, as shown below.

The error description read:

You must install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with the most recent service pack. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 without service packs has a known compatibility issue with this version of Windows.

I downloaded and installed the newly released Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with SP1 installation instead and it worked like a charm.

Note that you have to download the complete installation of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 1, instead of downloading only the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Service Pack 1 (SP1) which is intended to be installed on existing WSS 3.0 installations.