I have a Compaq laptop that I attempted to install Vista 64-bit on, but ran into driver issues (sound, video missing, wireless LAN flaky), so I decided to rebuild with the 32-bit Vista. I assumed (rightly) that driver support would be better. All the installs were done by booting directly from the DVD, and I had everything backed up onto my server so I formatted the drive as well.
I downloaded the ISO from MSDN, burned a DVD using Sonic, and started the install. Got an error 0x80070017 when it was 3% into expanding files that said that it could not continue. Great. I figured I had a bum ISO image, but when I checked the SHA-1 checksum it was what was posted on the MSDN download page. Hmmm... maybe Microsoft posted a bad install image?
So I waited until yesterday to download it again, thinking they'd catch it and fix it. Burned a new DVD, and got the same error at the same place. Nuts. Maybe Microsoft didn't fix it... or...
I finally decided to run the ISO image copy to DVD at 1x speed since I've had problems like this with other ISO images in the past. Ran the install, and happily it worked fine. Logged into Vista and found I had no sound and had only standard VGA, but let it download the updates it told me it needed - and sound and video drivers (and a few other bits) were installed. Still had an issue with the wireless LAN where it wouldn't connect me even through I put in the WEP key, but it was late and I may have mistyped, so I'm going to try again tonight.
I had good perf scores for the drive, memory, and CPU, but the score for business and game graphics was 1.0, so I won't be expecting a great Aero experience :(.