okay, during my googling, I came across this:
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=625
Now, halfway down, the author says: "Ok people - after hours of sleepless nights in the shed, searching through
newsgroups, search engines and the microsoft support sites - I found the problem.
I installed the no-install version but got the same error message - outlined
below was the cause:
The computer was configured to use drive C: for the zip drive, D: for cdrom
drive and the 2 hdd drives E: and F:
When I ran the mysql setup program - (i now understand the error message - no
thanks to microsoft) - for some reason the setup file was basically searching
for drive C: (which had no zip disk inside) - I hope you understand things so
far.
Anyway to solve the problem - I went into disk manager and reassigned the zip
drive to Z: and everything works now."
That reminded me that for some reason, my main harddrive had been labeled as F. Could this be my problem? Wouldn't it make sense that windows is trying to use my C drive, which contains nothing, so it gives me an error?