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