I'm getting the same issue here. At different points during the 2 stages of generating screens, everything freezes. At first I thought the box was overheating, so I moved to a larger case with more fans, but it's still hanging and doesn't seem to be overheating. I'm using an intel board, 2.8GHz, 3G memory, on-board VGA, hardware RAID3 (5x400G SATA) on a PCI card, 2x400G SATA attached to the MB, and DVD-RW. Besides the keyboard and mouse, that's everything. The OS is installed on the RAID. I get through the Video/Audio setup and then the Launch Manager starts, and stalls. I've tried re-installing. Any ideas what the problem is?
Forgot to add, this is a DVD install, i386, rc2. I turned off hyperthreading in the bios, but that didn't resolve the issue. The software download in the Launch Manager says that it completes successfully. I've also tried booting without the on-board NIC disconnected, since my local network ip is 192.168.1.X, and LinuxMCE is set with a static ip 192.168.80.1, I believe. I plan to configure this dedicated core as the Domain Controller/DNS/DHCP server, once it's up and running, until then, I'd like it to be DHCP to play nice with the rest of the network.