Thanks Imagemaker. I have it up and running now. After following your instructions it came down to file permissions and security settings which I sorted out in no time. Your assistance was helpful and timely. It got me thinking about producing a set of tutorials for every possible scenario one might face in getting DNN 04.03 up and running.

For anyone out there who might experience the same stuff, I suggest you follow the steps below in sorting out the security probs:
1) Make sure your sqlserver userid you are registering in web.config is the same one under whose account you are using DNN
2) If you don't want to do this, then you might consider giving the universal "Everyone" account full access to the folder in which your DNN root is located. However I imagine the security implications here are great so thread carefully, depending on whether you are installing on an offline, testing server or on a production machine.

Once again thanks Imagemaker and Adefwebserver