Vista Installer: Failure to Launch?

I've got a system here that won't launch the Vista installer..

It'll boot from the CD and it gets as far as displaying the Vista wallpaper
(the blue/green type wall paper) but the installer never launches after
that.. I've tried the DVD also & changed the IDE channel the DVD drive is
attached to.

It's using a PCI IDE controller (Promise something or other) but even with
the DVD as slave and the HDD as master it still won't launch the installer
after booting from CD/DVD.. I've verified the MD5 sums of the images and no
errors were reported my Microsoft File Transfer Manager while downloading the
CD/DVD ISO images.

I've also used the DVD successfully to install Vista on another machine
(never activated it, just installed to see if my DVD was busted or what).

Anyone ever seen this or have any suggestions?