Problem solved, it was the evil keyboard
Has anyone ever seen that one before? I went to install win7 on the next machine, and blammo, same freeze, same spot. I decided to start swapping everything. It was the Dell keyboard that stopped the win 7 install before it went to the graphical "language, keyboard, time/currency prefs". Grabbed a different keyboard and loaded both x86 and x64 versions of the RTM with no problems on both machines. Go figure...