adding from the dashboard I get this error

The following errors occurred when attempting to process your request:

* An error while trying to unzip the package: There was an error unpacking your add-on or theme. Perhaps you have not uploaded a valid zip file, or you do not have zip installed.

I am getting permissions errors running it via the "Save for Later"

What directories do these installs deal with and what level of access do they need? I Do not remember having a problem previously with this.

"Perhaps permissions are set incorrectly or the target directory does not exist."

The "error unpacking your add-on or theme" message will be displayed if Concrete5 finds that there are no files in the unpack directory after the package is unpacked. There are at least three reasons why this might happen:
1) Unzip did't have write access to the temporary directory.
2) You don't have unzip installed, or it is installed in a different location than Concrete5 expects (check the DIR_FILES_BIN_UNZIP setting in concrete/config/base.php)
3) Your PHP is configured to disable the execution of external programs

If you have some PHP experience you might be able to narrow the problem by debugging the code. This particular code is in the Archive->unzip method in concrete/libraries/archive.php

The "Save for Later" stuff is all new in 5.3. In order for Concrete5 to install a downloaded package it needs to be able to copy all of the files from an installation dependent temporary location to a directory of the form <concrete5-base>/packages/<package-name>.

Make sure you have 'packages' directory and that it is writable by concrete5.

Todd is right, but I'll add this:

there are two packages/ directories you might encounter. One is in the web root, and one is inside the concrete/ directory. So if you c5 install is at /home/whatever/public_html/ there'd be

/home/whatever/public_html/packages/
/home/whatever/public_html/concrete/packages/

You want to give write permissions to packages/.

Note: if you're running PHP as as CGI like on many popular webhosts (MediaTemple, GoDaddy) you probably won't have to do this.

I'm trying out Concrete5 using XAMPP under Windows Vista.

Can I invoke WinRar.exe instead?

including winrar does probably make little sense.

But I've already posted a patch to this method which works on windows as well if you enabled the zip module.

Try to use this patch:http://www.concrete5.org/community/features/get_rid_of_unzip_depend...

Is there a modern day version of this? I get this whilst trying to update to the latest version of concrete and could really do with cracking this one.

Thanks
Sean