I'm glad that worked for you Dariel. I have no idea why it was going sideways when it got to your web.config and would probably have to have access to your server to figure it out.

This issue appears to have been caused by the "location" line in the web.config that prevents inheritance of web.config when installing DNN at the top-level of a site rather than as a virtual directory. I commented the "location" tags (don't forget to comment the </location> closer too!) and the install worked. Then I uncommented them again. That allows the install, though it's still not working and now I'm going to have to run back through the configuration to make sure it works the way I had it for my specific scenario.