player1up - i found the issue. i had failed to load all the modular chip programs up to my ftp site. duh! so now when you run the new version it will download 14 or so new files when you exit the program. hopefully it will then work the second time. sorry. thanks for the post.
*edit*
also, vista and above users should no longer have to deal with the UAC prompts for normal (non updating) access. btw, the updating log file is stored in the same location as the mptune.exe program (normally C:\Program Files (x86)\MP Suite\MPTune) called MPUpdateLog1.txt. additionally when you read/write a chip a couple other log files are created which shows activity and other informative info (normally in the C:\Users\"username"\AppData\Roaming\MPTune directory) including mpt2boot.txt (detail regarding data read from / sent to chip) and mpt2coms.txt (identification of com ports on the pc).