FWIW, I installed the updates on another machine with the same downloaded files and all went well on that machine. On the original machine (my development notebook), I've now tried removing VB, VFP and VI and reinstalling first VS6, then SP3. Still no go.

The second time, I tried installing the VFP/VI/VJ files first (last time, I did VB first). This time I noticed that the "installation" went very quickly on my machine compared to the other machine where I had time to watch several files go by.

Not sure what the difference is. Both machines had VS6 SP2, NT4 WS SP4, IE5, ...

Still looking for ideas. I guess the next thing to try is a full VS6 removal and reinstall. Yech.