the dvd is the version 1.00 without ANY patches,
impulse is the online installer that will download and install the latest version(currently 1.09E.49 meaning there have been 9 (that is right NINE) major patches and three hotfixes to date),
and impulse is NEEDED to download and install the patches anyway,
the only potential hurdle for impulse downloading is the approx 2gb download to install elemental online,
the patches are a lot smaller( from what I remember it is about 30mb to 50 mb for the patch to current from release),
and from what I remember reading the installer apparently unarchives the files one at a time and is very slow about it.
you could look at the disc to check out the 'elemental.7z' which tells me it is a 7zip file and needs the 7zip archive manager(just google 7zip) to extract it manually,
and another bit of info that might help is there is an impulse installer in the support folder of the dvd along with the NEEDED vcredist2005sp1_x86 and an OLD acrobat reader 9.30.
harpo
