I should say that I had it working at some point, just with framerate issues. Then I reinstalled the OS completely and wasn't able to get it back up again. I didn't reformat my old HDD when I swapped over and some threads I was investigating was saying that trying to install games to NTFS will screw up permissions.
I'm not going to troubleshoot this today so I would hate for you to take time to try to sort this for me now, but I think your tips well help me get that "last mile" once I have things near where they should be.