Logged In: YES 
user_id=31435

We are having more reports of installer problems under 2.1 
than under previous releases, but I can still count the 
total on one hand.  Since we don't have the installer 
source code, and reports are still so rare (notwithstanding 
your particular bad luck) there's not much we can do to 
track them down.

Did you use the MD5 checksum program to verify your binary 
is valid?  Go to http://www.python.org/2.1/, go down to 
the "MD5 checksums" section, and click on the "MD5" part of 
the section heading to get a Python program for computing 
the MD5 digest.

In *almost* all past cases of "corrupt installation 
detected" messages, further investigation has revealed that 
the binary *was* corrupt.  The MD5 digest is a very 
powerful check on that (much stronger than a CRC):  if the 
checksum you get doesn't match the one on the web page 
above, your installer is definitely corrupt.  If it 
matches, the chance that it's corrupt anyway is too small 
to entertain.  So do that.  That you've had *repeated* 
installation failures is unprecedented in Python's history, 
so my top guess has to be you have a flaky binary.

There is only one other cause I've ever heard of for 
a "corrupt installation detected" message under NT:  the 
user was logged in to a Restricted account when they tried 
to install.  In that case, the Wise installer apparently 
can't even get at the system components it needs to compute 
its own internal checksums, and interprets that failure as 
a bad checksum.

So, what were you logged in as?  If the MD5 digest matches, 
and you're logged in to an Administrator account when it 
fails, then you've got a problem never reported before.  Do 
you?

As to using another Windows installer, I'm in favor of 
that, but so are you <wink>:  who's going to do the work?  
I can tell you I don't have time for it.  BTW, have you 
tried ActiveState's Python installer for Windows?  That's 
built with entirely different, and up-to-date, technology.  
Maybe it will work better for you.  But the terms of the 
ActiveState license don't allow us to use it too (fine by 
me -- they paid for it).

As to believing me, you don't have to:  ask Wise 
Solutions.  It's their product, version 5.0a.  You can't 
even find it mentioned on their web site anymore -- it's 
that old!  They're on version 8 now, and even their 
newsgroups only back to version 6.