I had trouble installing silverlight and after a bit of reading saw that many people had the same issue and had all decided it was simply impossible to do, or rather windows 8 didn't support it. Something along those lines anyways. So I figured I'd throw VMware on the laptop and run Ubuntu so I could use moonlight (I believe that's what it's called) thus being able to watch Netflix again. But no, Vmware and Vbox wouldn't install, MSI problems were preventing it.
I figured I'd give it a shot on the virtual build and everything installed without a hiccup, including silverlight.
After some head scratching and some angry words I discovered something silly. On the hardware build the entire appdata and thus the temp folder, you know the folder that programs write things to when they install and while they're running, was set as read only. More head scratching and more angry words and some general bewilderment. I took care of that and made sure to tick the "apply changes to all sub folders and files" box. I also took ownership of the temp folder and deleted everything in the temp folder (that I could anyways, one file was in use by explorer) and did a quick restart.
Everything works great now. I'm not sure if taking ownership and dumping the folder are really necessary, but I'd suggest doing that as well the restart.
I only tried these three programs but I imagine this little problem would get in the way of many other programs installing (although apparently not chrome or CCCP).
Some things really baffle me, I'm aware this is a pre beta build so bugs are to be expected, but this pretty much made the OS useless. And it appeared in one system but not another completely identical to it? Strange indeed.
If anyone else had this problem let me know.