On Fri, 2006-05-12 at 12:14 -0700, Michael Hannon wrote:
..
>      Performing post installation configuration
> 
> At what appears to be exactly half way through that process (judging 
> from the progress bar) the system hangs.  When the system hangs. the 
> only visible activity is the regular, periodic blinking of the Caps Lock 
> and Scroll Lock lights on the keyboard.
> 
> At that point the keyboard is inoperable, so it isn't possible to use 
> CTRL-ALT F3, etc., to bounce over to the other windows to see what's 
> really going on.  It isn't even possible to use CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot 
> the system.

For the archives (since the problem went away after removing some
hardware):

Blinking Caps+Scroll lock usually indicate a kernel panic, which also
matches the "machine dead" description - on 2.4 kernels, it actually
would be sending a one-line error message via Morse code (no joke).

You could try to switch to a text console (Alt+Ctr+F1) close to the end
of the installation, and hope to see a more informative backtrace from
the kernel.

Regards
jan