And I am FAR too lazy to go through all that work. So, one could single out the issue by checking the processes and services that run normally but are not running a minimal boot in safe mode. This didn't fix the issue normally, but then I booted in safe mode, ran the installer, and it worked INSTANTLY. Edit: Aha! Well, I got it to work immediately: safe mode! The first thing I did was make sure that every executable in the CD-Rom drive was both set to Windows 98 Compatibility mode and set to run as administrator (verified by checking in registry).
