Had almost the exact same experience. Decided to re-install after messing with permissions and now I cant get it to work. It hangs when trying to start service during the instance configuration wizard (Trying to re-install 5.5.9 on a Windows 7 64 bit computer). I've tried just about everything I can think of and the only thing that is working is to disable the InnoDB engine and use MyISAM - not really an option since I need transaction support.
At this point I've uninstalled 5.5 and installed 5.1 which seems to be working fine.
Here is the output from trying to start the service manually:
C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5\bin>mysqld-debug.exe --console
110223 12:08:12 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled.
110223 12:08:12 InnoDB: !!!!!!!! UNIV_DEBUG switched on !!!!!!!!!
110223 12:08:12 InnoDB: The InnoDB memory heap is disabled
110223 12:08:12 InnoDB: Mutexes and rw_locks use Windows interlocked functions
110223 12:08:12 InnoDB: Compressed tables use zlib 1.2.3
110223 12:08:12 InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, size = 77.0M
110223 12:08:12 InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool
110223 12:08:12 InnoDB: highest supported file format is Barracuda.
InnoDB: The log sequence number in ibdata files does not match
InnoDB: the log sequence number in the ib_logfiles!
110223 12:08:12 InnoDB: Database was not shut down normally!
InnoDB: Starting crash recovery.
InnoDB: Reading tablespace information from the .ibd files...
InnoDB: Restoring possible half-written data pages from the doublewrite
InnoDB: buffer...
110223 12:08:13 InnoDB: Assertion failure in thread 5088 in file ..\..\..\mysql-5.5.9\storage\innobase\buf\buf0buf.c line 2591
InnoDB: Failing assertion: block->page.offset == page_get_page_no(page_align(ptr))
InnoDB: We intentionally generate a memory trap.
InnoDB: Submit a detailed bug report to
http://bugs.mysql.com.
InnoDB: If you get repeated assertion failures or crashes, even
InnoDB: immediately after the mysqld startup, there may be
InnoDB: corruption in the InnoDB tablespace. Please refer to
InnoDB:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/forcing-innodb-recovery.html
InnoDB: about forcing recovery.
110223 12:08:13 - mysqld got exception 0xc0000005 ;
This could be because you hit a bug. It is also possible that this binary
or one of the libraries it was linked against is corrupt, improperly built,
or misconfigured. This error can also be caused by malfunctioning hardware.
We will try our best to scrape up some info that will hopefully help diagnose
the problem, but since we have already crashed, something is definitely wrong
and this may fail.
key_buffer_size=41943040
read_buffer_size=65536
max_used_connections=0
max_threads=100
thread_count=0
connection_count=0
It is possible that mysqld could use up to
key_buffer_size + (read_buffer_size + sort_buffer_size)*max_threads = 74039 K
bytes of memory
Hope that's ok; if not, decrease some variables in the equation.
Thread pointer: 0x0
Attempting backtrace. You can use the following information to find out
where mysqld died. If you see no messages after this, something went
terribly wrong...
000000013FC34528 mysqld-debug.exe!buf_block_align_instance()[buf0buf.c:2591]
000000013FC34601 mysqld-debug.exe!buf_block_align()[buf0buf.c:2620]
000000013FCF08D7 mysqld-debug.exe!mtr_memo_contains_page()[mtr0mtr.c:394]
000000013FBB9C5B mysqld-debug.exe!ibuf_bitmap_page_get_bits_low()[ibuf0ibuf.c:713]
000000013FBC2E78 mysqld-debug.exe!ibuf_merge_or_delete_for_page()[ibuf0ibuf.c:4435]
000000013FC3A885 mysqld-debug.exe!buf_page_io_complete()[buf0buf.c:4067]
000000013FD0546F mysqld-debug.exe!buf_read_page_low()[buf0rea.c:161]
000000013FD04F09 mysqld-debug.exe!buf_read_page()[buf0rea.c:190]
000000013FC3514D mysqld-debug.exe!buf_page_get_gen()[buf0buf.c:2809]
000000013FD20D89 mysqld-debug.exe!dict_hdr_get()[dict0boot.c:56]
000000013FD2110F mysqld-debug.exe!dict_boot()[dict0boot.c:267]
000000013FBD348B mysqld-debug.exe!innobase_start_or_create_for_mysql()[srv0start.c:1699]
000000013FB9FB89 mysqld-debug.exe!innobase_init()[ha_innodb.cc:2475]
000000013F7A4426 mysqld-debug.exe!ha_initialize_handlerton()[handler.cc:462]
000000013F79A3AC mysqld-debug.exe!plugin_initialize()[sql_plugin.cc:1063]
000000013F79A0D2 mysqld-debug.exe!plugin_init()[sql_plugin.cc:1349]
000000013F777CCF mysqld-debug.exe!init_server_components()[mysqld.cc:3869]
000000013F775787 mysqld-debug.exe!win_main()[mysqld.cc:4433]
000000013F778A14 mysqld-debug.exe!mysql_service()[mysqld.cc:4626]
000000013F778E72 mysqld-debug.exe!mysqld_main()[mysqld.cc:4812]
000000013F771034 mysqld-debug.exe!main()[main.cc:25]
000000013FEB5687 mysqld-debug.exe!__tmainCRTStartup()[crt0.c:266]
000000013FEB558E mysqld-debug.exe!mainCRTStartup()[crt0.c:182]
0000000076FBF56D kernel32.dll!BaseThreadInitThunk()
00000000771F2CC1 ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart()
The manual page at
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/crashing.html contains
information that should help you find out what is causing the crash.