Well, I feel both stoked and disgusted at the same time. I finally got the
Vista upgrade to install successfully on a brand new Acer laptop.

The short conclusion: Uninstall IIS before upgrading to Vista.

The long story:

I was getting an installation failure and rollback with no explanation, just
"one or more system components could not be configured", etc. Four hours of
waiting, down the drain, with no information about what went wrong. Anyone's
guess was as good as mine.

I re-ran setup two or three times, each time another four hour wait, with a
number of changes, including ...

- Clear out more space on the C: drive; leave at least 15GB

- Observe that SQL Server 2005 SP1 had failed earlier; uninstalled SQL
Server 2005

- consider that Daemon Tools uninstaller might not have uninstalled the
virtual SCSI driver, so I tracked down the virtual SCSI driver installer and
told it to uninstall

No go. No explanation, just, no go.

An undocumented but mentioned fact observed in these newsgroups is that
there are some setup-related log files "pooped" into the
"C:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources\Panther\". It was now my job to put these "Panther"
droppings under a microscope and see if anything interesting can be found.

The first place I looked, setuperr.log, only brought about frustration,
anger, and resentment. Apparently Generic Command
({81a34a10-4256-436a-89d6-794b97ca407c}) failed, and that's why the rollback
occurred. Yeah..

You have to be kidding me.

Someone at MSFT then posted, "let me see your setupact.log file".
Apparently, the relevant data I needed was buried in that pile. It was like
searching for a needle in a cow pie, but then, there it was. Generic Command
was identified: IIS Metabase upgrade.

I uninstalled IIS, renamed Inetpub, tried to rename
c:\windows\system32\inetsrv but there were a few DLLs still lingering in
there, but that's okay as long as there weren't anymore XML files...

I re-ran setup, and left it running through the night. I woke up to find
Vista pleasantly asking me how I wanted to handle Automatic Updates. It
worked!!

The moral of the story is: Scouring panther droppings is disgusting and
should not be any end user's job.

- Jon