So, i tried installing this on my other laptop, and it installed fine.
Only (software) difference between the 2 laptops was that one had been running for a few days longer, and had all of the windows update patches installed on it. So, I checked the first laptop that the install failed on, and there were a bunch of Office 2007 updates to install - so installed those and tried the install again. After the office patches were all in place, the VS 2008 Team Dev install worked. This still baffles me as to why it gave me such grief for the first couple days.
I just might have to fire up a VM if i get some free time to test this all again to see if that was really what fixed it - seems strange that office patches should block my VS install.