I too am having the same problem, even with all other plugins disabled. I get the same error message.

The solution from wordpress.org's support forum involves creating new database tables using your hosting company's phpAdmin utility. I had the same problem for a WordPress blog I'm building for a client but the hosting is on a Window's server and I don't have direct access to the database.

I was able to solve the installation error in a much simpler fashion. I think the problem occurs because the code uses the WP database object for stating the table names that need to be created to track the stats and options. I'm guessing that in WP versions < 3.0, this technique failed gracefully if the table did not exist and a later piece of code in the plugin installation section caught it. Now it gives a hard failure.

THE SOLUTION

Edit the plugin file. Find the SQL statements that create the two tables. It's around line 255. You can do a case sensitive search for the string: "CREATE TABLE" to find the statements as well.

Change the first line of each of the two SQL statements from:

CREATE TABLE $wpdb->ak_popularity_options (

to:

CREATE TABLE ak_popularity_options (

and, a few lines down, from:

CREATE TABLE $wpdb->ak_popularity (

to:

CREATE TABLE ak_popularity (

Save the file and try again to install. If you get another error saying that a table already exists, as I did, re-edit the plugin file and restore those lines, that is, put the $wpdb-> part back into the SQL statements and try again. It worked for me, I hope you have the same luck.

Note. Be aware that there are backticks around the table names in the plugin file but they disappeared when I posted this comment. They should be optional if the table name doesn't have any special characters but that may depend on the SQL engine