For other teams that see this thread, as Ken said, our suspicion is about some security settings on these laptops. They were graciously provided by a sponsor and are running Windows 7 x64. One thing we noted is that although we have an account with admin privileges, and we turned off the virus scanning apps, we cannot turn off the firewall because it states that is restricted to the System Administrator. So we are curious if that could be the issue since all other types of laptops install fine.
One other thread I am tracking is:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh....php?p=1210457
Especially the post about the same very generic message we are getting. There it indicates it may be a .NET installation issue.