Thanks for the tip, Dave... I was traveling this weekend and just had time to give it a shot.
Things move along fine for a while. I now see the warning screen come up that asks which drive to use for the install and warns that all data will be removed, but the install just goes on without waiting for input... maybe because there's only one hard drive in the system, and it's brand new (empty).
Some text flies by after that and the last line of output is:
Running local boot scripts (/etc/rc.local) [OK]
There are several warnings above that about files not found and directories that don't exist. I'm not going to have much time to wrestle with this in the next few weeks, so I think I might just wait for the next version of Linux MCE and try again. I know the Hardy livecd will boot on the machine, so I'm hoping that will be less of a struggle.
Thanks,
Mark