Well I'm not sure what the secret is, but I've tried about 50 times (okay a few less), and it always crashes on the final stages when integrating hotfixes. It doesn't seem to matter WHAT hotfixes I include - it will crash during that step. I am running as administrator, I have taken ownership of all the working files, etc, but it crashes every bleedin time. I have also tried the last final non-beta as well as the current beta. Have tried with sp2, sp3 and two different source disks - one already sp2'd (with sp3) and another RTM with no service pack, to sp2 and sp3, all go crashy. EDIT: Loaded the files up over the network on my win2k backup box (via tightvnc), and there's no crashy - same source files. So it is clearly a vista problem Sorry I have no idea what the problem is - I was running it as administrator, so that wasn't it. But it DOES work with the SAME source files and service packs/addons when run from a Win2k box.