back to the drawing board.....

Correction: You can only make ISO smaller than 300MB with PowerISO. You can mount anything you want to, and if it doesn't want to mount it just change the extension to some format it will mount

Good spot! thats what I meant. It does appear to run better whilst mounted with Daemon tools, ie- it still doesnt work but gets me further into the app!

Got some CD's now so will see if that works.

I hate not being able to do something, makes me more detirmined to do it!

You say you mounted and then extracted the files. I don't really get what you mean by that. What I am used to is that you mount and install, not mount, extract and then install.

That may very well be your problem.

Simply mount the CD and double-click install.exe

Thats what I did to start with, the reason I extracted the files was so i could play around with the files on the ISO.

I know i'm doing it right (its not really that hard)

I now know what the problem is......... bit embarresed to admit it ...................... the app doesnt work on vista! and i'm not joking!

and before anyone says it, i've tried running in compatible mode, but getting aspi driver error messages again, just like i was at the very start