My son received King’s Bounty: The Legend for Christmas, which is sort of a remake of King’s Bounty, the predecessor of the Heroes of Might and Magic series. Although my son says the game is pretty good, I believe it was the hardest game I’ve ever tried to install. After clicking setup from the DVD you hear 3 dings, but then nothing appears to happen. After ending the process and retrying several times, I checked Task Manager and noticed a process called setup.tmp using 100% of the CPU. Since I wasn’t getting anywhere, I decided to search and see if other people were having the same problem.
After a quick Google, I went to the 1C forums (the game’s developer) where people were indeed complaining of having the same exact problem and trying different solutions. The first suggestion was to right-click setup.exe and do Run As the local Administrator account. This did not work for me. The next set of tries involved running setup.exe in compatability mode. One person said Windows 98/ME mode worked for him. I tried all of them and none worked for me. The last resort was try the install in Safe Mode. Someone said they tried this but had no luck, but it actually worked for me (I went into Safe Mode with Networking to be exact). After successfully completing setup and rebooting, the game ran fine, which was the same experience other people had who were able to get the game installed.
I still have no idea what the problem was, which was the consensus of others working on the problem, but at least the game works now.