Ok. I found a solution that worked for me. I don't know why, or if it will work for anyone else. All I know is that I've had vista running since last night and, although a little laggy, since it is a resource hog, it's still going strong.
What I did was boot to my xp boot, then start the installation from there. I chose clean install onto my newly formatted vista partition. I also unchecked the box that said let windows intall updates automatically during set up.
The other thing I did different than the first two times I installed was, the first time I did a clean install booting from the cd. I was able to do this because my product key wasn't working so it gave me the option to install without a key. I had a validation issue, long story. Anyway, because of this issue I had to install again but the second time I installed xp first then did an upgrade from the same boot I was installing to because microsoft tech support said I had to do an upgrade in order for the new product key they gave me to work. It was this upgrade installation that gave me the freezing issue.Now, what I'm seeing in this process is that the two times I was able to do a clean install, I had no freeaing issue, but the one time I upgraded from XP, I couldn't work for 5 minutes without my system just freezing. I don't know if you guys upgraded or did a clean install, but if you upgraded, you might want to try this. Like I said, my system isn't freeaing anymore and so I'm happy. If anyghing changes, I'll update.
