I grabbed the demo version from the Adobe website, extracted it, set the installer going, takes about 20 mins to complete, and it only installs some of the components, and not Photoshop itself.
So, I thought it might be corrupt, so after several installs, I tied it on my XP partition and it worked first time.
So, now I know the files are ok, I had a search in the tinterweb and found the wincs3clean utility to clean any old installations ready for CS3, I also found what looks like hundreds and hundreds of people complaining about the same thing.
I did it at level 1 cleaning - still wont install.
Level 2- still wont install.
Level 3- nope.
Level 4 - nope.
Level 4 another 3 times just in case - nope.
Went through the registry and removed every instance of adobe that I could find, as well as photoshop, macromedia etc.
Ran the cleaner again, rebooted, nothing.
Had another search on the tinterweb, found something about registering some javascript files before installation - still nope.
Tried disabling Kaspersky completely, tried disabling pretty much everything else, still wont install.
I'm going to ring Adobe in the morning, but before I do, has anyone got a fix for this?
Im on Vista x64, all updated.
Ta