>No idea aboute wise and Vista 64
>google for error 1603, thats the one namend in the log

thanks for pointing that out - i'm looking into that error now - that's very helpful

>ALLUSERS=1 is set in the one and not in the other what I read on a short look on both logs?

this is only there in one because it got far enough to set the "install for all users on this computer" vs "install only for this user" default setting - both had the same setting but only one was able to get far enough to the setting of the default setting. thanks for trying though.