[support] Access Denied when trying to create first account

[ext237 ext237]

Hi,

We've installed several successful Drupal sites on other servers, but
having a difficult couple of days with a new install.  After the
install is complete, and we click on the link to create the first
admin user/pass, everything seems to be going ok.  When we click to
save the new user/pass, we expect to see the message to check our
email for user/pass.  Instead, we get the standard login screen.

We get the actual email, and when we click the email and get the page
with the "login" button, clicking it results in the "Access Denied"
page.

When trying to log in via the usual user/pass combo, we go back to the
normal first page with the username & password fields still there.
The watchdog table seems to indicate we logged in correctly.

We've reinstalled Drupal several times, and cleaned out the
database/reinstalled.   I've checked the forums, but the issues that
seem related are about Drupal 4.x.

Here's our setup, what are we missing?

Drupal 5.3
MySQL 5.0
PHP 5.2.5
Apache2.2
Windows2003 Server

Thanks in advance

Joe