My principal suspicion would be that there is some bad ram causing this. Either that or an unstable processor.
If you have more than one stick you can try swapping one out at a time. For unstable or overclocked processors, a trick that sometimes works is to disable the external (L2) cache in the BIOS until setup is complete.
You also want to make sure that antivirus protection is turned off in the BIOS.
Copying the files to the hard drive and running setup from there is also a technique that works for some problem installs. Bryan explains how in this thread:
http://forums.techguy.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=60354
If you can't swap the ram out and want to try a software tester (worthwhile, but not a 100% reliable if it passes), you can install DocMemory to a clean floppy, boot it like a startup disk and let it run for a couple of loops before pressing esc.
http://www.simmtester.com/PAGE/products/doc/docinfo.asp
If you have more than one stick you can try swapping one out at a time. For unstable or overclocked processors, a trick that sometimes works is to disable the external (L2) cache in the BIOS until setup is complete.
You also want to make sure that antivirus protection is turned off in the BIOS.
Copying the files to the hard drive and running setup from there is also a technique that works for some problem installs. Bryan explains how in this thread:
http://forums.techguy.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=60354
If you can't swap the ram out and want to try a software tester (worthwhile, but not a 100% reliable if it passes), you can install DocMemory to a clean floppy, boot it like a startup disk and let it run for a couple of loops before pressing esc.
http://www.simmtester.com/PAGE/products/doc/docinfo.asp