I had this issue first on my laptop and then my desktop, when variously installing or uninstalling Express editions of Visual Studio and in particular the ASP.NET MVC 2 components that I was using at the time. The installer would sit suspiciously inactively while uninstalling the MVC 2 tools, and could be left for over an hour without any progress being made.

In all situations my fix so far has been simple, though it’s always taken me an hour to remember it; temporarily disabling Kaspersky anti-virus (just about the only commonality between my Windows XP laptop and Windows 7 desktop) sees progress immediately resume on the installer. Clearly there’s some conflict between the activities of the two but so far it’s not failed to un-stick a stuck installer.