Have computer with OEM TIH, I uninstalled before attempting upgrade and hung at Win logo on reboot

Hello all,

I have been using TIH since version 8 back in 2005. I have upgraded over the years and now use 2010 and it's plus pack as well as disk director.

My question today is, I purchased a music production computer called Creation Station assembled by Sweetwater Sound from a friend. OS is Win XP SP3. Apparently one of the preinstalled programs is OEM TIH, not sure which version. I wanted to do a full backup of the OS and data drives but figured I would upgrade the TIH instalation to one of my newer versions.

I uninstalled OEM TIH, not realizing a "startup recovery manager" was set up in it's hidden partition. I was actually unaware of this capability, never having set it up in any version.

I attempted to install TIH home 2009 and since it is an "upgrade" version it asked for the s/n of my TIH 11 trial version (ver 11 not 2011) and figured I could authorize it with my s/n. I chose full install and it seemingly proceeded without error. Upon completion a popup indicated a necessary reboot. This is where the trouble started. Upon reboot the system hung at the Win XP logo. Hard disk activity light stopped, dead in the water.

I attempted several reboots with no success. I contemplated going into safe mode and uninstalling TIH but decided against that. Ended up using "last known good configuration" to get back into Windows then used system restore to go back to restore point I created before I uninstalled the OEM TIH.

Now things got really weird. The restore went normal but the icon for TIH 11 was still on the desktop. On the start menu, in the Acronis folder TIH 11 was there too where it had been OEM previously. Upon execution of TIH 11 I would get the Microsoft error popup and request to send report which I denied since this machine is not currently on the network.

At this stage I attempted to upgrade TIH 11 to my TIH 2009 upgrade. Upon reboot... BSOD!
Totally frustrated at this point, Windows add remove programs would give error that program could not be uninstalled. I installed Revo uninstaller and finally achieved TIH 2009 uninstall.

I then logged into my Acronis member area and downloaded retail version TIH 11 and installed successfully. Or so I thought. All seemed to work properly until I got to the final step of attempting an image backup and would get the #1722 error "the RPC server is unavailable".

Apparently through all these installs / restores, the Acronis OEM Startup Recovery Manager remained in place. So I rebooted, hit F11, got into the recovery manager, set up an image backup and voila, it worked as expected although seemed to take longer than I might have expected.

So I currently have TIH 11 installed. It seem operational but will not mount images created with TIH 2009 or 2010. Yet it will mount the full backup image recently created by recovery manager!

I would actually like to get back to the system state of the original OEM TIH along with the startup recovery manager. I have numerous restore points I could try but something strange is going on with the restore leaving the current version of TIH still installed!

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.