Have installed Mandrake 7.1 and 7.2. Must admit, the 7.1 distro does install much quicker, and is smaller! I've got the 2CD version (from the cover of PC Plus, UK) of M7.2, and whenever I try to do a minimal installation (just KDE and really basic stuff) it wants to take up about 1Gb. M7.2, on the other hand, is quite happy installing in under 500Mb!

Never really had a problem with speed. My AOpen 1040Pro DVD drive reads home-baked CDs quite nicely. Have tried installing from my old cd-burner (2x2x6x RIP) which took forever, but from DVD (with 66 controller), installs in about 40/50 mins.

i might as well throw in my 2¢...
it took me three tries.. it always locked up when installing packages.. though it wasnt slow at all when it finally worked... but on a pIII 600 w/256mbRAM, i did think that was strange... but hey it could be worse, we could have no distros and just thousands and thousands of source files... or even worse, have window$...