When installing 2.57 (or 2.57a) on Vista (using the installer), choosing the option to use %HOME% as the base for installing user files, the installation is completely broken. Attached is the (redacted) output from systeminfo. No .blend is attached because it doesn't get as far as loading one.

The console output shows:
found bundled python: C:\Programs\Graphics\Blender\2.5\2.57\python
bpy: couldnt find 'scripts/modules', blender probably wont start.

(Note: with the default shortcut settings, the console buffer is much too small to see this. The shortcut should be created with 9999 buffer lines to ensure the start can be seen)

The installation creates a directory %HOME%\2.57 which contains the scripts and plugins directories (but no config directory). This should all be under %HOME%\.blender.

SysInternals' procmon shows python is looking in each of the following in turn:
<installation_dir>\2.57\scripts
%APPDATA%\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.57\scripts
%HOME%\release\scripts\
<installation_dir>\release\scripts\
%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.57\scripts\

None of these exists, and the %HOME% one at least is definitely wrong.

The result is that there is no UI. Placing the scripts into %HOME%\release\ did not fix the problem.

SUMMARY:
The scripts are installed into the wrong place, and python is looking in a different, but equally wrong place.

EXPECTED BEHAVIOUR:
Scripts are installed (read-only) into the installation directory. They are then copied into the chosen user directory (either under %APPDATA% or %HOME%) on first run by a user. This ensures that each user gets a known-good copy and can always recover if they damage their copy.
Note that I do not see %APPDATA% as an acceptable location. Firstly, this would quickly fill my system disk, and secondly I have many scripts which run on both Linux and Windows (via cygwin), and they expect to find the data in a consistent place.