WinME upgrade to WinXP freezes

Hi,

While trying to help a friend upgrade to WinXP from
WinME, the install goes well until the last 19 minutes
remaining (according to installation). At that point it
just freezes, no errors, no harddrive activity, even
after 1 hour. Looking in various log files, no errors are
recorded. The last activity line in setupact.log
says: "Setup invoked the external program
C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe /c start C:\windows\system32
\cmd.exe." Anybody have any clues?

TIA,

jnauhl