Vista - install failure

Trying to install Vista Business but it fails just after the point
were you have inputed your regional details and you have the
screen which says "installing now, please waite..." nothing further
happens - just the hour glass .
Oddly enough I can succesfully install and use XP Pro on this
machine so this tends to rule out bad hardware, also the Vista DVD
will install to a different machine.
Machine specs are :

MSI K9 NEO3 MoBo
AMD A64 X2 Dual Core 4800+ AM2 CPU
1 X 2GB Kingston 800MHz Hyper RAM
MSI NX8400 GS TD256E Graphics card
WD 250GB JS Caviar SATA11 HDD
Pioneer DVR-216 SATA Optical Drive
All above are new components

Things I have tried
Swapped all out bar MoBo & CPU during T/shooting, have also set BIOS to
"fail safe".
Checked MSI site for BIOS update, nothing specific comes up relating
to a hang during setup.
Tried installing to a raw HDD and allowing setup to create partition[s]
Partitioning to 30GB primary rest as logical in extended partition
before running setup with BootitNG.

Has anyone seen this behaviour in a simillar setup ?.
all help appreciated

rgds
Roberto