Well, I actually got through to a Dell tech, who was quite nice, we spent a while chatting about tech stuff. It turns out this was a known bug in early Dell OEM XP CDs, that "password" I couldn't get past was an unrelated password from a sysrep app accidentally left in the Recovery code, and was only known to about 2 people on the entire planet (no wonder I couldn't get past it). There are some various workarounds (one is to make 6 floppies from a download, where that PW problem was fixed). Another is an SP1 OEM CD. All set now, anyway.