Actually, that's what happens on my Windows Zope as well. Can you try another machine?
I had that happen when I was trying the 2.3.0 betas. The Win32 Zope installation creates some Registry entries. One of the entries points at the location of the service code. If you uninstall Zope it does not remove those entries from the registry. If you later install another version of Zope in a different directory, Zope will fail silently trying to start the service.
how to fix? edit the registry and remove the offending references. Install Zope again, and all will be sweetness and light.
Bleah. The problem is that ZService.py does its own registry fiddling that is not known to the WISE installer, so it can't clean it up correctly (PythonService.exe also does some fiddling, but I don't think that affects this). I've done some investigating and I've found a way to make WISE invoke ZService.py remove (to clean up) on uninstall. This will be included in 2.3.1 b3. Note that for those who do not have Zope running as a service, it currently shows a quick error message in a dos box at uninstall time (though the error doesn't hurt anything). Tomorrow I'll take a look at the ZService.py and see if there is a way to shut that up. Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com