New Laptop Won't Play Nice with Quicken

I have a Dell Inspiron 6000, XPSp2 loving everything except the lack of control I had over my home-built machines.

I bought Quicken for it. Tried to install; no dice. I get install error 1603, 1622 & 1311, depending on which recommended Intuit fix I use. Have tried installing in from safe mode (recommended) - error 1622. Have tried copying it to hard drive (cyclic redundancy error) (recommended). Have downloaded and run MSIFIX -error 1603 (recommended). Have slung it across the room at the wall (not recommended but felt better.)

I spent hours in Intuit Support Chat and they finally just had me download something and it worked, but when I woke my comp up next morning the hal.dll had fried and I had to F11 and reset since I didn't have my restore disc yet. Lost everything, of course: memo to self, do backup even at 4 AM. So we're back to start, and before I go and spend hours and maybe screw up another .dll file, has anyone overcome this? It is a known issue, because they have a dropdown box on the Intuit site specifically for these errors. I need a fix, but more importantly I'd like to know why it's happening so I'm not dependent on support. Intuit just says "various issues with Windows configurations and MSI".

If anyone can shed any light on this, I would be most appreciative - the info I get from here is usually three times as helpful as anywhere else.

BTW, I have run the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility, shut off my antivirus, and tried installing use Add Programs.

Many thanks!