You may need to wait longer.  When I installed it took about 55 minutes all up, and 40 of that was spent with nothing 'apparently' happening.  Then the permission screen came up and the installer followed and was only another 15 minutes.

Are you on Vista by chance.  I remember a few other Vista users back in the betas were having similarly long install times.

Ahhh yes, the perfect topic to hop into .

I'm in the same boat, had the same problem with one of the betas and now with the final release.
Back then i was adviced to disable my antivirus software and that worked (did need a few trial and error attempts though).
But with 1.0 nothing seemed  help, the setup just got stuck.... when trying to do ANYTHING in Windows it even locked up my whole system (a premiere for anything since i started using Windows 7 tbh), so i had to switch off my computer manually.

I did report that here on the forums, but it seems it was a mistake to do that via a thread necro which still had a [beta] tag in the thread title, so no one responded.

Long story short, i left it there, as my backlog of games was immense at the time FE was released, but now i'd really like to start to play the game i've purchased.

Here are my core specs, maybe they would help:
Core2Duo 6760
4 GB RAM
Geforce 460GTS
Win7 64 bit
Antivirus software: Avira
Firewall: Zone Alarm (both were disabled when trying istalling FE last time. I tried it via stardock central or via direct download from the website).
All drivers up to date, no other conflicts with any other piece of software, be it games or things i need for university.

Any help would be very much appreciated!