At the time that I was originally writing Project HQ, the latest versions of Pylons (the web application framework Project HQ is written on) and SQLAlchemy (the database abstraction layer) were 0.9.7 and 0.5.5, respectively. Unfortunately, while these two projects have continued forward, and released later versions, I haven't had the time to go back and take care of installation problems with Project HQ.
So, I am aware of the installation problems, and I'm planning to release a new version of Project HQ in the next few weeks which should solve the installation problems some folks have been getting.
In the mean time, if you're unable to get Project HQ running, you can run the following commands to get working versions of Pylons and SQLAlchemy:
easy_install Pylons==0.9.7
easy_install SQLAlchemy==0.5.8
