SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard errors

Was trying to install SharePoint 2010 with an installation account, sp_Farmadmin. Got an error message saying that "An error has occurred while validation the configuration settings. The errorData argument cannot be null or zero length."

I had to dig through the SharePoint logs in the 14-hive to figure this out, but it ended up being that the installation account didn't have permissions in SQL Server to provision the SP_Config database. Gave my user sysadmin permission in the database (should have beeen securityadmin and dbcreator, actually), and tried again and succeeded.