My custom built 2.5 GHz machine has been "inspecting" for the last hour.

Am I in computer h3ll, or will it recover? Place your bets. . .

Edit to say, after three hours the system was still hung. With some trepidation I killed the installer (since exit didn't work either). The machine actually came back up!

I then killed every non-windows process in the Task Manager and went for sp3 again. This time it worked . . .