After all the ideas and help from here and almost 4 hours with a Dell technician, I'm no closer to success.
We went through all the suggested solutions involving registry edits/deletions that I could find. We still come up with "Consistency validation for SQL Server registry keys" failure. There are a series of SQL Server keys (HKEY/LOCAL/Software) that we can see but we are prohibited from deleting.
I want to call Microsoft. Is there a special SQL Server phone #?
Eric Johnson