I have Cubase, it's 2 gigs yet it extracts/installs as 150mb. Why is the iso image file 2 gigs when it installs 150mb?!

I think you misread the installation instructions. They advise to have a minimum partition size for Windows, when you start afresh. Does the installation come in a tar or tar.gz type of file? They have extreme compression.
If that is a downloaded iso, it probably includes someone else's projetc(s).

Well actually the 2 gb file is a mdf image and a 4kb mds image file. It extracts to actually 1.2 gb and installs 150mb of cubase sx 3.0. I thought that was odd because i thought everything compressed in some format whould extract bigger then the original file size (2.0 gb extracts to more than 2.0 gb); (300mb exe; 100mb iso, would extract more than the original 300mb; or 100mb file size). I get it working fine though except i can't up date it from 3.01 to 3.02 version. Seems the update has no effect, but maybe that's because i used a crack before and that interferes with the update, not sure..but other than those two weird things it's workin fine.

As we are talking illicit software here I'll close this thread.