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Admin Tools has nothing to do with this. I am positive about this running it on more than a dozen sites myself since I first wrote it in September 2010. On top of that there are several thousand clients using it on hundreds of thousands of websites without any such issues. Also, I am one of the three people who know very intimately how the Joomla! extensions installer works behind the scenes and one of the two people who know Admin Tools' inner workings inside out.

When you are logged into the backend of your site, where extension installation takes place, the only checks performed by Admin Tools are:

• Is your IP not included in the IP whitelist (depending on your settings)?
• Is your IP blocked by the GeoIP blocking (depending on your settings)?
• Is your IP in the manual IP blacklist (depending on your settings)?
• Is your IP in the automatic blacklist?
• Are you trying to create a Super User or change someone else's account to a Super User (depending on your settings)?

If any of these conditions is met you are blocked and you see a message about it.

What you are experiencing with the double installation requirement is, actually, a series of bugs in Joomla! which I have experienced since Joomla! 1.5.5 - long before I started writing Admin Tools. The defining factor for these issues is the complexity of the extension. The more total folders and files that have to be written the more likely is to get Joomla! to "forget" to copy some of them. Moreover, on update, Joomla! will forget to copy entire folders because caching gets in the way (Joomla! sees the extension's manifest from the previous version already installed, not the one currently being installed). Solving it requires disabling Joomla's cache in Global Configuration.

This may not fix it permanently, though. I haven't been able to reproduce this issue without the cache being enabled but some people claim it's happened to them. I take this with a grain of salt because as Dr. House would put it "patients lie" - not because they enjoy lying but because human memory is not an infallible archive. When I ask someone if they had caching turned on and they've changed a bazillion options on their site between original issue and discussion they might look at their site, say "no", and simply not remember that turning off the cache was one of the things they tried. So there.

The "getting stuck in the middle of installation" is, in fact, a completely different issue altogether, again unrelated to Admin Tools. The process of installing an extension takes longer than PHP's or Apache's maximum execution time limit. The defining factor for this issue is the total number of files being written and the host's performance. Small plugins and tiny modules usually install just fine whereas complex software like Akeeba Backup, K2, HikaShop etc (just to name a random few) may hung. I'm afraid the only thing you can do for the this issue is to choose a different host.

However, it is possible that the latter issue can also happen if the installation does succeed but your session expires -or is deleted- in the meantime. This depends on which kind of session handler you are using and, if it's the native PHP handler, where the sessions are stored on your server. We've seen many servers storing the sessions in a subfolder of /tmp which gets auto-deleted every few minutes, effectively logging you out at seemingly random intervals. Then there are more exotic issues such as servers dropping the network connection while a long process is running. In any case, these are server issues, not Admin Tools issues.