Both Windows 2000 servers are now online and joined in the active directory and happily replicating away. unfortunately exchange won’t install on the server either because we blew away the server details in AD to get the server to join the domain or because I had notification monitoring running on the server (this can cause the setup routine to crash!) However, when I hit the cancel installation it just cancelled that section of the install so I no longer know whether exchange is installed or not. I guess not seeing as though its not working and won’t let me restore the databases. Back over to Microsoft again 🙁