IIS fails to complete install

I have been trying to install IIS 5.1 for XP Pro, and cannot get a complete installation. It hangs on the SMTP configuration. IIS does appear to have been installed, but doesn't work at all. In fact it hangs my Dreamweaver into an endless loop when I try to Edit a Site--with a "Server busy alert..." (can't quit, and must Task Manage to quit DW.

I also cannot view the IIS properties when I click on Internet Information Services in the Admistrative Tools section in the Control Panel.

I've tried uninstalling IIS, uninstalling the Administrative Tools, and reinstalling, etc. Nothing seems to work, or help.

I did have some problems with this installaiton of XP Pro after a crash, a replaced hard drive, and reinstall of XP Pro. Trouble began when I installed SP2. I had to upgrade the Installer.exe to cure an overall install hang for any application including Windows updates.

And I have booted using msconfig with just basic Windows files to clear out bogus system restore points. This cured the overall installation problems I was having with any application or update. I also have system restore turned off, but this didn't help either. I have also cleaned the registry with Norton Win Doctor.

I have a Dell Lattitude D500 with 2GB RAM.

Any help or insight into what may be the problem will be appreciated. I'm a Web developer consultant and I need this machine to run IIS. Ted

Turn off any firewalls and script blocking software, log on as a local administrator user, and try your install again. Perhaps uninstall the existing partial IIS first.

I presume ur running with administrative privalges and not just with some kind of power user/user?

is there anything coming up in the event logs?

Thanks... I had to uninstall Norton Internet Security, 2005, and install just the Norton AntiVirus. I got a clue by turning off Internet Security completely, could get IIS to work, but couldn't isolate which Norton component was causing the problem (AntiVirus, Outbreak Alert, Personal Firewall... ) Finally after uninstalling, and installing Norton SystemWorks with AntiVirus everything worked, and IIS runs great.

HOWEVER, this just makes no sense. I have almost the same configuration, and same Norton Internet Security running on my Dell Workstation 380, and I have no problems with IIS... only difference is it's newer, and came with XP Pro, SP2.

In some cases the order of installation can affect problems like this. For example, a lot of firewalls will automatically configure an application when it's first run, and when you install the firewall over already running apps there can be problems. Some time back zonealarm free issued an update that broke IIS, causing the WWW service to hang forever at "starting". The fix was to manually stop the www service, set to manual startup, reboot, and after the reboot start IIS and then za gave a popup about a new service, what do you want to do, blah blah