On Friday, Windows Vista RTM finally became available for download from the Subscriber Downloads section of Microsoft's MSDN site.  I was really excited that finally, I'm going to get Vista installed on my new Dell D620 laptop.  I had previously given up on Vista Beta 1 as it had way too many problems to be used for a production machine.

Anyway, I burned a Vista RTM DVD and about an hour into the install, during an “Expanding Files” phase, at 94%, it bombed out that it was missing a file.  Nothing about the filename, no ability to retry, no ability to try again.  Just an “OK” button and an error number 0x8007045D.  To retry, the entire install had to be retried.

Two more failed attempts and 3 hours later, after extensive searching, I found other references to this error number, but no real solutions.  Finally I found an unrelated article that had made a suggestion saying that Microsoft recommends burning the DVD at 2X speed rather than any higher speeds.  My immediate reaction was that there is no possible way that the speed at which the DVD was burned could have any impact on this issue.  After all, if the DVD was going to be corrupt, why would the setup start at all?  And why would 94% of the file uncompression proceed without errors?

At this point, I had no other options.  I burned a new DVD using 2X speed rather than the default 16X speed.  Walla!  The install worked great and it only took me about 6 hours to figure it all out :-(

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