Glad it worked for you.   Hope it was successful for LL.   I tried all of the steps above, still not working.   The only thing that I could add that might help others is, for years I've kept automatic updates fully on WinXP, but upon visiting the update site and choosing Custom rather than the recommended default Express, there were several necessary updates that had not been applied.  All of that is resolved now.   The NVIDIA driver update caused my monitor to go blank upon reboot, so had to reboot in safe mode, restore to previous, and start over, eliminating the video update.   I went through all the steps of uninstalling Flash, and reinstalling version 10 in both IE8 and Firefox.  I picked through and found the other files, folders and walked through all the steps.  Not much else I can do.  

LL , again, hope it works for you....you've surely been working hard on this.  By the way, I googled for info about lost Windows password recovery....and there are ways to do it....but, I didn't want to see you go through what I did with the video driver, so didn't post any links.   Apparently it is possible to get it, but it involves creating a boot disc, and you'd run the risk of it maybe working, or maybe not.   You'd need to do a full backup of your files before trying something like that.   It doesn't seem one could get a P8 fix to work without rebooting...it's required in several of the steps above....but hope somehow that you can.

~skylab   : )