Cognos 8.2 installation/configuration

[jse_aus]

Hi,
I am having some issues with an installation of 8.2
Originally I had cognos 8 up and running fine, fm was able to publish, cc able to run/save reports all fine against my 10g datasource. 
I then tried to get the series 7.4 stuff installed and working, and alas, I have spent the best part of 5 days installing, configuring and reinstalling stuff without any "complete" success.

What I have done so far for series 7 (ok, ive done each of these about 10 times over):
1.  installed sun one (manually, the wizard from the supplementary cd has never worked for me)
2.  installed series 7 products (all of them)
     including access manager and ppes, but not transformer yet
3.  used the defaul configuration on each installation, I set up sunone with all the defaults from the user guide.
4.  seemingly successfully applied the "configuration manager" settings by opening the currrent config and applying and starting the services without any errors

Something that is bugging me is that in a previous install, there was a 3rd party.directory server.sunone in config mgr, but i dont have one in there now, and I dont know how to create a new node in there or what to put in it.  the directory server info seems to be in "services.access manager-directoryserver.general" and also in "services.access manager runtime.authentication source.directory server".  so not sure if this is because ive missed something.

I can start access manager admin and log in to the directory server ok (a valid test on my crn box). 
I can open "cognos configuration", save and start the services from there
I can still get into cognos connection, but:
    I cant open or create fm projects (comes up with "CCL-RCI-0007 The runtime configuration files for the rci component are either missing or not in the configuration folder")
    I cant run reports
    I cant test my (previously working) datasource from cognos connection (same error)
   and i obviously cant use and of the studios

I am experienced with reportnet 1.1 mr3 (administering and developing for a couple of years now), but not that familiar with the series 7 stuff (we have transformer cubes running on ppes, but i installed/config'd them a couple of years ago and only "used" them since) and ive never seen config manager prior to this install!...

If youve got any suggestions (i think i'm doomed to just start over!) i'd really appreciate any comments/ideas.
Thanks in advance and sorry for the huge amount of amble,
James.