OK, it all seemed to be a driver issue - I added almost everything back in except for languages and things that were 100% never going to be used, made it run slow as hell (good old bloated Vista, eh?), but also had same problem, even through ethernet, which I told to keep the ethernet drivers. Ended up using ethernet drivers for a HP laptop, which worked, and then I could get proper drivers by updating through device manager, in particular the WLAN drivers, which from the Acer site don't appear work on Vista (for me anyway). Now I'm going to try slipstreaming SP1 and then putting this slipstreamed iso back through vLite (that's the right thing to do, right?), and see where that gets me. Last time I tried this though, when it restarted during installation, it moved back to copying files and just stuck there, rather than going to completing installation as it should have done, any ideas what went wrong there?