OK there IS an install icon on the desktop, so I think we can safely say that your problems stem from a dodgy CD burn tickmike.
I deliberately trashed the MBR and partition tables on this disk prior to install but the installer ran into problems as somehow it still saw an old ext3 partition. Dealt with that by recovering the partition and then deleting it. So I thought let's reboot and run from scratch. For most people this won't happen as you won't have old disks with various filesystems lying about
Anyway - onwards.
Rebooted. Prompted to set the keyboard - set to UK; chose GMT and the UK ntp pool for time sync; chose ethernet for connection and selected the relevant network adaptor; chose automatic IP and then clicked through the next three screens without changing the defaults.
Login as guest and double click the "Install PCLinuxOS" icon. Enter the root password and then clicked through all the rest of the screens without changing the defaults. Wait for files copying. Click through the bootloader options without making changes and enter a new root password. Create a couple of users. Reboot and log into user account.
Use Synaptic package manager to "Reload" and then "Mark All Upgrades". Set it going and wait for the 606MB of updates to download/install. That's where I am now.
The only things I've had to really do are change the keyboard locale to UK, set the time zone and select the UK ntp pool. Everything else was just the default settings.
Looks like the updates are nearly complete - back in a bit.