Issue with Office 2013 and SharePoint 2010 on Same Machine

My reward for boldly installing the beautiful new version of Office on my Windows Server 2008 R2 / SharePoint 2010 dev machine? At first, a seemingly unaffected SharePoint environment and cool animated Excel cursors. But after a while:

Failed to call GetTypes on assembly Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.Server, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c. Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Office.InfoPath, Version=15.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

This starting infecting my event log (and was weirdly repeated in the error message over and over; about four pages worth of times) whenever I tried to create a new web app or run psconfig. Many articles on the web pinned this on the MS Chart components (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=130F7986- BF49-4FE5-9CA8-910AE6EA442C&displaylang=en) being missing or corrupted or whatever. I already had this installed (since it's a prerequisite of SharePoint 2010) and so the installer downloaded from the above link barfed.

Here's my panic escalation over the next few hours:

• Uninstall and reinstall the chart components. (How awesome is it that a chart tool can bring a collaboration server to its knees?)
• Manually GACing every Microsoft.Office.InfoPath.*.dll file on my hard drive
• Reboot
• Run psconfig
• Uninstall SharePoint
• Reinstall SharePoint
• Run psconfig

Which left me with half a SharePoint and half a night's sleep. I kept thinking to myself: "InfoPath? INFOPATH? Why is SharePoint trying to load types of the 14 (2010) server version of InfoPath but failing because it couldn't find the 15 (2013) client version? And I don't even like InfoPath, and haven't used it since 2003. So I uninstalled InfoPath and SharePoint started working just fine.

The overwhelming personal irony here is that, back in 2003, during my first ever consulting gig and first ever time working with SharePoint, I put in sleepless night after sleepless night marrying SharePoint 2003 and InfoPath 2003. And here I am, three-and-a-half versions of .NET later, desperately clawing them apart. I love technology.