Unable to expand go-pear.phar

Been fighting a losing battle with PEAR today and I'm hoping you can help

I'm trying to get PEAR 1.4.9 running with PHP 5.1.4 on a Windows XP (don't ask) Professional box. This machine is behind a Squid proxy running CentOS 3.

Firstly, the PHP installer doesn't put php.exe in the PHP directory, so I have downloaded the PHP ZIP file and extracted it from there, along with the PEAR folder including its go-pear.phar file, and the go-pear.bat file. Added CHP to my PATH.

Run go-pear.bat, also tried php go-pear.phar, but both work only sometime (been reinstalling a lot regarding another issue I'll be asking about later).

It says it has:

Configuration written to CHPpear.ini

Then it tells me it's extracting Archive_Tar-1.3.1.tar, Console_Getopt-1.2.tar and PER-1.4.9.tar. Now, I know from successful extractions that it should then proceed to additional files, including some PHP files and .reg files etc. Unfortunately this doesn't always seem to happen, sometimes it will just tell me to press a key and stop the extraction at this point, and I am left without valuable files like pearcmd.php which I need to proceed.

Does anyone know why it's failing to extract all the files all the time? In case of a bad download I have tried wiping my browser cache and using another mirror to get the PHP zip with go-pear.phar in it, but without any luck.

I am having exactly the same problem.
Nothing seems to work and I am unable to install pear either using the online go-pear.php site or the command line.
The system just pretends to install but nothing happens, exactly the way you describe it.
Why isn't there a zip with all the packages or something? This is so frustrating...