BUG #4763: postgres service unstable, even during install

The following bug has been logged online:

Bug reference: 4763
Logged by: Kevin Field
Email address: kev(at)brantaero(dot)com
PostgreSQL version: 8.4-beta1
Operating system: Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition SP2
Description: postgres service unstable, even during install
Details:

Using
http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/binary/v8.4beta/win32/postgresql-8.4-beta1.zip
on a console mode session with SAV autoprotect disabled (and besides told to
exclude anything below "C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\"), three times now I've
tried to install (no stack builder, then adminpack+fuzzystring+pldebugger
and plpgsql+plperl+plperlu) and encountered the following problems.

The installer gets to the step "Activating procedural languages..." and an
error window pops up:

Database command error: server closed the connection unexpectedly
[square character]This probably means the server terminated abnormally
[square character]before or while processing the request

...and indeed, the service is not running. If I follow along with the
Services window open during install, at one point the new service shows up
and has status "Starting..." but I'm not sure if it fails to start or if it
starts and then the procedural language thing makes it bail.

I OK the box and another one comes:

"Failed to enable procedural language plperl. The files are installed but
are not activated in any database."

And another:

"Database command error: no connection to the server"

Then repeat the last two for "plperlu (untrusted)". Then:

"Failed to connect to the 'template1' database. Contrib files are
installed, but are not activated in any databases."

...and then finally "Could not connect to server" and asking whether it's
accepting connections.

If after the very first error message I go into Services and start it
manually, the last two messages here do not come up, but the rest still do.

Then I get a success message.

However, after that when I try to run a script to dump another database and
restore it onto the beta, I get a "file not found" error, which is really
odd both because it was working fine on the 2009-03-24 build and because the
permissions have not changed. Aside from that, which is it's own problem,
after that error the service is no longer running and has to be started
again.

This makes me think that something similar happens during the install, so
that something fails with the plperl setup that causes the service to shut
down (rather than it failing to start up in the first place.)

Anyway both the 2009-01-01 and 2009-03-24 builds seemed smoother to set up
and much more stable. Not sure why that would be...

Thanks,
Kev