I redid the install and found the format doo-hickey Xiahou spoke of. I missed it the first time and ended up with that stinky dual OS setup. The second time went well and my buddy is now at home flying away on a clean machine, which is all he wanted to do. No internet, no nothing, he just wanted to fly IL2.

Ended up costing him around $700 (AMD-64-4000/2GB RAM/8600GT) for the rig and he has one program on it.

I love it.