After hearing much about LongHorn, I decided to install and try myself to see how it does perform. I downloaded the ISO from MSDN and made a ISO DVD using Nero.
The DVD never loads on Windows XP; and when I tried to run setup.exe directly it promts an error saying setup.exe is not a valid win32 executable that too after 2-3 minutes; thats bit surprising. Also, when I insert the DVD, it hangs for few minutes; nor it does boot using the same. It tries to read for some time and safely comes out to boot with other OS.
Atleast its bit better in Windows 2003 server. The same DVD loads the installer, but after entering the product key (which is a valid one), it immediatly crashes as below:
So, I tried to use alternative methods like mounting an ISO and/or extracting the files to a folder. Once I followed that, all seemed to work. The great advantage of Vista installer is, initially it just asks for product key, location to install and optionally the system name, and rest it takes care by itself. This could save lot of time for network engineers in the long run when they needed to install LongHorn on multiple systems.