Why do IBM refuse to produce good software? Websphere will cost you more money to install, develop on, test on and run that any other application server. If you're "playing to win", don't use Webpshere, and do use something else, like Weblogic, JBoss or SunOne (Oracle AS is worse than Websphere, so don't bother with that). Websphere will require you have a greater number of more highly skilled administrators available to get it running, keep it running and make changes. You'll also spend longer doing any kind of development or testing because it's so painfully slow.
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I've been trying to play with Websphere 5, and quite frankly, having little luck. About a year ago, I had to go on a whole training course before I was even slightly able to install Websphere 4, and things arn't much better in version 5. They have got rid of the need for a whole (big!) database (such as DB2 or Oracle, but nothing smaller). However, it still ain't great, and has more pre-requisites than features.
Now, if an installer is running as 'root' on a Solaris machine, why can't it create users and groups? It checks to see if "mqm" exists (for the built in MQ Series nightmare), it can't find it, so bombs out (well, gets stuck in a "Next ->" loop actually). It even says the user can't be created! I've now created the users and groups it grumbles about, and it still fails to find them. It's also saying "root is not a member of group mqm" - not sure why it needs to be, seeing as it's the superuser, it's in all groups, specified as such or not. I dread to think what perils lie ahead when the thing is installed and running...
So, IBM: Pull your finger out and get your act together. This software is awful, and just because your marketing budget is mahoosive, is no excuse. You quite frankly should be ashamed to be turfing out such bad software. You above all, should know better, you give all software vendors a bad reputation as being a bunch of thieves and crooks. Get it sorted!