Me and .NET Will Never Get Along

i guess our disgruntlement is reaching the 'til death do us part' mode. first my report works fine in crystal report. then included it in .NET everything worked fine, apart from the portrait became landscape no matter how you've already set the orientation. wanted to fix this later i changed the application to point to the production dB, which is an exact replicate of the development. and eversince then i encountered the 'specific cast is not valid' error without further explanation. googling wholeheartedly to find the solution, i came across one article about a conflicting framework that might caused this. then it hit me - i uninstalled crystal report 9! could that be the problem since the report is done in CR9 instead of CR.NET?. i re-installed CR9 and still encountered the problem. frustrated i get my machine reformatted. after which i installed .NET only, redo the whole thing and execute it. even report wise i do a very very simple report. to my horror 'specified cast is not valid' again. so, not because of CR9. i then installed CR9 as we're used to work with CR9 for report and include it in our .NET later on. this is not the first time i'm doing this - i've been working this way for almost 4 years now. i guess i really have to concentrate on fixing this problem asap. anyways, eversince i install .NET they kept on asking me to register, which i never encountered before. i guess its due to the new version of .NET. so, i stupidly (or carelessly) using the keycode i got from CR9. and guess what? i couldn't get in .NET. always invalid keycode. thank god one colleague had the password of the ID to access the registry and we fixed it. basically deleting the keycode for my CR9 which i registered right after installation. a little bit of adrenalin pumping there, for the wrong reason. more like a mild heart attack, i reckon. well i know we can never get along, but for the sake of my rice bowl i think i have to face it. after all i was the one telling my boss i still want to do some coding.