When the installation hung, it was stopping
on "Completing Installation" with 25 minutes left. The
dialog box said it was setting one of the COM+ services
to System. I used the taskmgr command from the command
prompt and looked at the processes that were running in
the background. There was a DLLHOST.EXE process running,
but using no CPU cycles. I don't know whether or not it
was a worm or just part of the COM+ loading process, but
I decided to end the DLLHOST.EXE process. As soon as I
did that, the setup continued and ran to completion! I
was even able to run DCPROMO and convert to Active
Directory with no issues. Outside of an old NetRAID
service and some configuration tweaking, everything
appears to be running just fine!
 

The <shift-F10> and <shift-F11> tricks during setup were
critical to this installation completing without having
to reinstall or restore from backup. Talk about saving
time! I hope helps anyone who gets into the same
situation as I did.