>If you have it, ERD Commander is often able to give you the necessary command line access to do the repair or run the partial reinstall of NT you need.

I guess that's what the LAN Tech had - he had both the CD and a set of repair bootup disks with a name something like that, switching them back and forth at times - he did make it futher past the Logo, but eventually concluded the system was probably hosed, after an hour or more of struggling. At least it wasn't worth any more time.

So we did a fresh Clone install from scratch. Turns out there really *is* a bug in the IE5 install that LAN has made under NT, that pretty much hoses the system. They didn't catch it, since they tested in a different application load sequence environment (a separate IE5 install, instead of a package). But they can reproduce the problem on other machines now, so are working on a fix in their test labs.

"Always glad to help testing" - I say (muttering under my breath), as the NT machine sits here dead.