ok, sorry for bugging everyone:) i figured out why the installer
was failing, and why several other installers i had were failing
too. i nuked everything in my windows/temp dir, and several of those
files were read-only, so i guess some installers were trying to
create files of the same name and couldn't overwrite the old ones,
and thus failed.
another interesting little tip to add to the bag of tricks:
clean out the temp dir often.
time to race!:)