Hi Wayne,

It's NT Workstation with service pack 4 applied.

I called Microsoft and the suggested renaming all occurrances of
setup.stf to be something else. That didn't work. Just for
chuckles, I moved the entire setup folder structure to the local
drive. Amazingly that fixed the problem.

I speculate it must be a network rights problem.

I'll still need to figure it out but have bought myself at least
a few days in which to do so.

Any ideas?