Ok, I solved this particular case. Between google and what I was seeing it seemed like it wanted to activate but couldn't. I could see McAfee starting up in the background, I could get some handicap access things to work but all I could see was wallpaper otherwise.
I redid the sock and it seemed to work but then it didn't. I ran IE and it brought up v6 (the default w/ XP install) BUT I saw IE7 and IE8 update dir's in the windows dir. Since I was in safe mode I still couldn't get out to the net but I wanted to see if IE was working at all. Then it occured to me, when I did the repair install it probably wiped the IE back to the discs copy. So I put IE8 on USB thumb drive and installed it (laughed as it "checked for malicious software") and rebooted and waaa laaah! Activation screen. It uses IE to show that screen. That got botched up and so that was the issue and that was the fix. -- Regards, joeuser - Still looking for the 'any' key... "...now these points of data make a beautiful line..."
