Mysql woes on win2k3

I recemtly had to reinstall the os on one of my servers. Firstly imho, if you can avoid win2k3 sbs - do so. I have always founf it bulky and full of great licensing restrictions that have annoyed me. Anyhow, I kept on getting a great error message by the mysql 5 installer configuration manager about how it could not apply security settings. I tried all sorts of changes including running as administrator. I decided to risk installing xamp even though I needed to run iis on the system. Well what do you know, low and behold you can disable installing apache as a service. It also happened to do the trick... Mysql was installed with no password on root. But now I was able to get into mysql and get everything running again. I know, its really just a workaround, but it worked for me.