installation trouble

[Dave Gordon]

Hi, I'm having problems installing cygwin on a system running
Windows NT 4 (service pack 6) and hoping someone can help me.  
I installed cygwin a couple of months ago without difficulty, 
but when trying to do an update yesterday installation failed 
with copious error messages.  After several unsuccessful attempts 
to get it working I thought something might be screwed up in the
registry or in the cygwin directory, so I deleted everything and
started a fresh install.  No luck.  Setup.exe now gives the same
error messages as when I tried to update.   In particular, while
trying to install autoconf-2.13-2.tar.gz, it pops up a dialog
with the message:

    error  unknown (or unsupported) file type `o'.

Which is followed by:

    error  unknown (or unsupported) file type `c'
    error  unknown (or unsupported) file type `'
    error  unknown (or unsupported) file type `r'
    error  unknown (or unsupported) file type `u'
    error  unknown (or unsupported) file type `'
    error  unknown (or unsupported) file type `s'
    error  unknown (or unsupported) file type `"'
    error  unknown (or unsupported) file type `t'

and so on ad infinitum (or quite a while anyway). 

I tried skipping autoconf, but then it chokes on bash, only
in a slightly different way.  It gives the message:

    warning  moving directory "E:/cygwin/" out of the way

Followed by:

    unable to write E:/cygwin/ 

These two repeat a couple of times and then it's back to 
a stream of "unknown (or unsupported) file type" errors,
with occassional warnings about moving and being unable 
to write E:/cygwin thown in.

When both autoconf and bash were skipped other packages
had problems (I don't recall which ones now).  All the 
packages seem uncorrupted -- unzipping and un-taring 
work without error under unix.  I tried downloading 
from several different mirror sites with similar results.
What else might be significant?  I'm running as administrator,
installing from packages saved in drive H (a Samba share), 
to E:/cygwin (a local drive).  I tried rebooting after
deleting cygwin and the registry entries.  Oopse, almost
forgot, attached to this mail are setup.log and setup.log.full 
from my last download.  No logs were written during the 
attemped install from the local directory.  Anything else?

I suppose I must be overlooking something obvious.
Would someone please suggest what else I might try?

Dave Gordon
-- 
Algorithmic Arts Inc., Tokyo, Japan
www:    http://www.algorithmic.com/