Ok, this is a complicated back-story.  Wasting third day trying to setup my old PC for my mom (new one coming tomorrow).
So first I did a clean XP install on one partition.  Then through it installed windows 7 on second partition.  
On the Win7 partition, first time I tried to installed Adobe Acrobat Professional I got an error during install.  I think it was 1310.  Then I decided to try to install Office 2003, got same error about 20% through.  Very strange.  I messed with some folder permissions, ran as administrator, even tried creating an administrator account and installing in there, same result.
Then I decided to re-install everything again from scratch.  Formatted the disk, made new partitions, installed XP, installed Win7 Pro.  Tried to install office 2003 first, that worked.
Then tried to install Acrobat 8 Pro again, error 1310.  Then download Acrobat 9 Pro from Adobe to see if a newer version might do the trick.  Similar error 1317, this on about attempting to create a directory in program files\adobe\acrobat9.0\designer8.2\de\templates.
Interestingly, the story doesn't stop there.  After one of these errors happens, I think it causes some sort of file system error.  One time I got a baloon setup_wm (if I remember right) something about file system being corrupt and unstable.  And if I try to open a browser after that things don't work.  If I reboot, it runs chkdsk and everything seems fine after, but no matter what I try I can't get passed that error.
Any ideas?