you definitely have some bottleneck holding you back, my guess is a slowmoleass DVD-drive

I had that with Vista as well already.
Dunno what causes it, but it's not really new.

Just reinsert the disc for a sec and it will start most of the time

definitely still some bugs in this RC

My install of WIndows 7 RC took a hair under 17 minutes counting from first mouse click to an idle desktop. Single 750GB disc, Core i7 920 system.

JMke, I've seen that before in Vista. It's a display driver issue... are you using the WHQL drivers? 185.85, not 185.81? Or AMD's new WHQL drivers...

Rocker, what I am saying is that that is normal. XP is not able to understand the ISO-13346 file system that the iso is encoded in. You can burn the ISO to disk anyway with the proper program. IMGBurn will doo that.

9600 GT with 185.85 WHQL
from NVIDIA site;

have not seen such a bug under Vista though (have it on another HDD for that system... never encountered this)

I've seen it before, but I don't remember if a reboot cleared it or I fixed it with a driver reinstall.