It's by no means rocket surgery, but I recently cleared out an older laptop so that I can do all my XNA development there instead of taking up my other computer's hard-drive. So I figured I'd post the all of the apps that I installed and the install order in case it was useful to anyone else :-)
- Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
- Visual Studio 2008 C# Express
- XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP
- Paint.NET
- XSI Mod Tool
Feels good to "Start over" as it were, without having to have four different versions of visual studio (2k5, 2k5 express, 2k8, 2k8 express) and all the other development crud that goes into "the day job"