So one of the goals is the successful completion of the MCTS 70-667 (SharePoint 2010 - Configuration).
To that end, I'll be posting things I find available for free, questions I have (and their supplemental research), and ultimately documenting my own thoughts on this endeavor.

Research Items of Value
Skills Measured
Learning Plan

I shall also keep track of my comprehension statistics at the 70-667 page above.

VSeWSS Service Error: Index (zero based) must ...

Still not certain of the cause; was debugging SharePoint 2007 code in VS2k8 when it simply refused to deploy.

It would build and had no visible errors.

The error directed one the following file:

dir: C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VSeWSS 1.3

file: VSeWSS1.3 service.log

The message itself was not terribly helpful:

2011/04/01 12:22:55    Error
System.FormatException: Index (zero based) must be greater than or equal to zero and less than the size of the argument list.
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Tools.Reflection.ReflectionUtility.InvokeMethod(MethodBase method, Object instance, Object[] parameters)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Tools.Reflection.ReflectionUtility.InvokeMethod(Type type, String methodName, Object instance, Object[] parameters)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Tools.SharePointProxies.SPProxy.InvokeMethod(String name, Object[] parameters)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Tools.SharePointProxies.SPFeatureCollectionProxy.Add(Guid id)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Tools.SharePointProxies.SPWebApplicationFacade.AddFeature(String url, Guid id)
   at VSeWSS.Server.Services.SPService.AddWebApplicationFeature(String url, Guid id)

As may be expected, searching for any of these libraries or functions returned nothing.

I finally did a simple iisreset and the problem went away.

If anyone reading this has an idea of the cause, please let me know; Google did not reveal its secrets.