Well Microsoft started pushing an update to Silverlight - updating it to version 2.0.40115.0 (40115? what are they thinking?) Of course it wouldn't install and there was no apparent way to uninstall the old version of silverlight. I tried even installing the new version right over the old but that failed also. So I dug around and tried some stuff.
Basically it involved downloading an old utilitiy from Microsoft that I had never discovered before. TheWindows Installer Cleanup Utility.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301