[support] Access Denied when trying to create first account

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