Microsoft has confirmed an issue affecting the installation of Expression Web 3, in which the process can take as much as an hour and still not be complete. “This odd behavior typically happens on machines running Windows XP without or with limited hardware acceleration. However, this may affect other operating systems as well. The long setup time happens because of a lack of full hardware acceleration support on Windows XP by DirectX.” “Minimizing the window hides the dialog box and the progress bar from the screen which means Windows doesn’t have to render it for you. So the installation will finish in a reasonable amount of time. What’s reasonable? That depends on how fast your machine runs and what kind of hardware it’s packing. Usually the Expression Web 3 standalone install (with Expression Design 3 and Expression Encoder 3) will take about 5 minutes. So you can maximize the dialog box from the taskbar to check the install progress to see if it’s done.”