SharePoint 2010: Solution for failing step 5 of the configuration wizard

This week I was trying to install SharePoint 2010 on Windows 2008 R2 (on VMware). That was not that easy. The major problem I faced with was step 5 on the configuration wizard. All the rest went well. There are a lot of sites/blog with information about the different steps, not that hard to do.
But I got every time the following exception:

Failed to register SharePoint services. An exception of type System.ServiceProcess.TimeoutException was thrown. Additional exception information: Time out has expired and the operation has not been completed. System.ServiceProcess.TimeoutException: Time out has expired and the operation has not been completed. at System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController.WaitForStatus(ServiceControllerStatus desiredStatus, TimeSpan timeout) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Win32.SPAdvApi32.StartService(String strServiceName) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWindowsServiceInstance.Start() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWindowsServiceInstance.Provision(Boolean start) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.Administration.SearchServiceInstance.Provision() at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ServicesTask.InstallServiceInstanceInConfigDB(Boolean provisionTheServiceInstanceToo, String serviceInstanceRegistryKeyName, Object sharepointServiceObject) at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ServicesTask.InstallServiceInstances(Boolean provisionTheServiceInstancesToo, String serviceRegistryKeyName, Object sharepointServiceObject) at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ServicesTask.InstallServices(Boolean provisionTheServicesToo) at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.ServicesTask.Run() at Microsoft.SharePoint.PostSetupConfiguration.TaskThread.ExecuteTask()

To overcome this problem, I tried to increase the amount of RAM from 1GB to 2GB. But that does not solved the problem. One of the other advices was to install SQL Server 2008 SP1. I was not able to install that on my version, so I skipped that part.
The solution that worked for me was removing a couple of registry keys. Removing the following keys solved the problem for me:

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0 \WSS\Services\Microsoft.SharePoint. Search.Administration.SPSearchService
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Web Server Extensions\14.0 \WSS\Services\Microsoft.SharePoint. Search.Administration.SearchService

So, finally I have a beta version of SharePoint 2010 running on a virtual machine. So time to play with it!