John,

In my experience as a Sage Support Analyst, I worked with a number of customers that experienced the same issue of having to manually uninstall the previous version before the next version would successfully install.  I have been consulting for 4 years now and can't remember a time where I've had to do that.  Not sure if it is an issue with old Operating Systems or older version of Pervasive, or just they way Sage had their installation scripts running, but I have been using the silent install script for over a year without issue.

I would recommend trying the silent install again.

I just used the silent install for the first time.  On my computers that failed, I believe the problem was that project management was still listed in the task manager even though it was not open. Once i closed that it ran successfully

I would say i ran it on about 25 pc's and had a 75% success rate.  Next upgrade I will check the task manager before i run the install.

We had this or a very similar issue with scripted installs. Essentially we were able to get around this issue adding to the process. We were left with: Reboot > Uninstall > Reboot > Install > Reboot. I do remember a couple machines we had to touch, but would say we were safely under 10%.