Initial Deployment to Azure

Hello,
I have been attempting a deployment of Sitefinity to Azure for a few days now and I have not had much luck so far.  I have a Standard linense with e-commerce add-on and initially I was attempting to install the Corporate Starter Kit with no luck so I moved on to a empty project.  Still problems.  They vary from roles that keep cycling to references to .dlls with the wrong version.  It seems like part of the problem is that initially I had the latest azure SDK and the October 2012 edition installed.  The result was errors related to .dll versions for the azure SDK.  I removed all azure SDK's, installed the October 2012 SDK and attempted another deployment however after 2 attempts to publish by uploading files I had published locally the upload stopped at 88% and failed.  
The documentation I am following is the sitefinity deployment docs found here:
www.sitefinity.com/.../deploying-sitefinity-projects-to-windows-azure
with some supplmentation from this blog post:
blog.longle.net/.../

I have tried both deployments via sitefinity thunder and manual deployments.  Is the  October 2012 azure SDK the only azure SDK that sitefinity supports?  Does anyone have any suggestions?  I know I havent given a lot of specifics here but it is only because I have seen so many different failures that seem unrelated.  Your help is appreciated.

Hello,

The version of Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.dll, Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime.dll, Microsoft.WindowsAzure.StorageClient.dll used by Sitefinity needs to be version 1.8.0.0. The latest SDK for Azure is not installing version 1.8.0.0 in the .NET GAC on the computer where the site is running.

Sitefinity Thunder also uses the assemblies mentioned above therefore you will not be able to deploy the project with it either if their version differs from 1.8.0.0.

Make sure the SDK is indeed installing 1.8.0.0 and after the SDK installation, perform restart of the computer as the installation wizard prompts.

Regards,
Vassil Vassilev
Telerik