I’ve been installing a new VPC with Windows 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and BizTalk Server 2009. I’ve never had so much trouble installing from .iso files. It seems to work 1 out of 5 times, or less. Even when you try the same file over and over it just pops up different errors, and then the fifth time it just works. It’s incredibly time consuming. I don’t even care to think about how many times I’ve re-downloaded and re-tried the installation. It’s all done now, but please someone make this easier!
If I never see a “A file that is required cannot be installed because the cabinet file d:somepathcabXx.cab has an invalid digital signature.” again it will be too soon.
I’m posting a few links for my future reference. Not that they didn’t really help me much, but maybe they will next time. They at least seem to be describing the issues I’ve been having, and the solution that seems to make the chance of success higher is to copy the content from the .iso onto the harddrive (in my case the vhd drive).
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/00cf6d2d-2bf1-49ae-8453-07ff11b0a380/
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/ecb1403a-a343-43d9-92c6-a50f5bee3cf6/
But hey, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or so they say…
Be Logical - Notes from Johan Hedberg 
Are you using latest VPC 2007 SP1? (6.0.192) Are you using latest VMAdditions?
For Windows 2003, try with these the next time:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=925336
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=938759
Not sure if there are similar fixes in Vista/2008 as well, but these are more or less required to install VS2005 SP1 and other large installations on Windows 2003.
I guess fast disks, latest Bios, NIC, Video, disk drivers and latest Windows Install 4.5 might be good to install before the installations as well.
For updates, e g SQL 2005 SP3, it may be useful to extract them with WinRAR or update.exe /x or update.exe /extract because I have seen that Windows installer extracts files to random disks, which may be your usb memory or a slow mapped network drive, where you don’t want the files extracted to. Alternatively, only use one (C:) writable disk.
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