further to this, i have succeeded, though I must say it was by going into regedit and following the steps to create a new key, string etc per the preceding remarks from other contributors.
i did find incidently the exact same key/string sequence in the registry of my son's laptop, where AOL 9.0VR had installed successfully - after I had uninstalled the 105 drivers and reinstalled them.
It would seem perhaps that the "system recovery" preformed unwittingly on my machine a week or so ago, had wiped the requisite key/string entry from my registry.
anyway, thanks for all the help