I have already installed Adobe Digital Editions 3.0 on my Acer Aspire One netbook (with Windows XP Home), and used it to read an e-book. But when I ran the same installer program on my desktop computer (with Windows XP Professional), although it appeared to complete the installation, every time I try to run the program, all that happens is that I get a message saying that it "has encountered a problem and needs to close", and then some error data gets set to Microsoft.
This is the first time that any program has failed to install correctly on this system (except for one that I tried to install into the same location where it was already installed under Windows 98SE - it wasn't too surprising that that installation failed).
This computer, although old (I built it in 2003), has more RAM (768MB) and a faster CPU (AMD Athlon XP 1700+, 1.47GHz) than the netbook ... oh, hang on, I've just checked, and found that the netbook has 1GB RAM (I could have sworn it was only half that), and a faster processor, too (Intel Atom processor N270, 1.60GHz).
So, is that likely to be the problem - lack of hardware resources? (More likely lack of RAM than a too slow CPU.) I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I just foolishly took it for granted that anything that would run easily on my tiny little netbook would also run on this hulking great desktop machine!