By the way I have tried the following troubleshooting steps:

1) I have tried installing from the exe several times using two different
administrator accounts.
2) I have tried installing in Safe Mode.
3) I have updated to MDAC 2.8 SP1 and MSXML 4.0 SP2 as per Dave Hawley's
posting.
4) I have disabled and even uninstalled my antivirus software.
5) I have run regmon and filemon looking for any evidence of which keys it
is failing on but there is nothing there.

I am sure it is a registry permission problem, as that is where is always
fails and the logs say that the DoRegistryUpdates:UpdSpInstallFromInfSection
Failed. When I run regmon I can see it dreating hte registry keys fo rht
einstall, but there is no failures reported when it tries to update the
existing keys.