Hey,

I had this problem trying to install Visual Studio 2005 SP1 (I know, it's old news, but I needed it okay?) on a VM. I'll post it for posterity if anyone runs into the issue.

Basically, the windows installer bootstrap can do a hash on install data before executing it to make sure it wasn't corrupted or tampered with.  This is a great feature for small files, but for large installs it takes a long time, and more importantly in this case, because SP1 was fairly large, it's possible to run out of free memory allocated for the installer to run the hash, at which point it just fails instead of installing.  Especially annoying not only because it's not immediately clear what's wrong, but also because it's trying to hash for like 20 minutes before failing so it's extra wasted time.

There's a patch for this, but I didn't apply it, because there's also a work-around that has the added bonus of speeding up installs by not checking that hash. (just make sure you're only installing reputable binaries!)  In Administrative Tools, you should find a Local Security Settings management snap-in (if it's not there, you can get to it from a higher level snap-in, or just type secpol.msc at a run window or command prompt).  If you click Software Restriction Policies it will probably say that none exist, in which case just right-click and add new.  What you want is to double-click the one that says "Enforcement", and change the software restriction policies so that it doesn't apply to local administrators.  Then as long as you're a local admin, it won't do that hashing.

 

(Disclaimer: this will probably just get overridden by the group policies if the machine is polcy controlled by the domain. :)