EA APP WONT INSTALL, TIMEOUT. ERROR INST-21-25000

Solved it. HIPS feature in ESET NOD32 needs to be turned off,

My antivir is Eset NOD32. As with other Antivir (at least, that is my guess), you can temporarily disable the antivir. Right click icon in the taskbar > pause protection - BUT then there is actually still a form of protection active that Eset calls "HIPS" or Host Intrusion Prevention System. See attached screenshot.

From the log files from the EA App installer (had to find these myself, with help from Claude AI pointing me in the right direction) I found that the install failure was caused by the installer somehow not having the required rights in Program Files and Programdata directories (failing to move files or create a couple of directories), even though it was running as admin and there is nothing peculiar with my W11 setup. What initially discarded Eset as a cause for me was that Eset was not logging that it had prevented a malicious software from access to these Windows core directories.

Well, turns out it was the HIPS feature anyways. With this disabled (you have to reboot before it is disabled) the EA app installed as expected.

It's a shame ESET doesn't log all blocking actions by default - I've had to dig in the ESET menus and set it to now log all actions blocked by HIPS. ESET has never ever given me any problems with any piece of software in the 20+ years I've been using Eset, or in the 15 years since they introduced HIPS. So I still consider this an EA issue - something about their installer tripped over Eset HIPS feature - the first "non-malicuous" software to have done so in the 15 years that HIPS has existed.