After a few evenings of fumbling, finally success!

For those who are interested the config is.

GA-P35C-DS3R (Rev 2.0) Motherboard Intel E6550 Core2Duo 2.33GHz 4 GB OCZ DDR2 PC2-8500 REAPER HPC EDITION Gigabyte 9600GT Passively Cooled LG BH08LS20 Blu-Ray RW Drive

That is simply ESXi installed.  No storage configured yet (still pontificating there) and no VMs…more posts to fllow, but I do like the colour scheme :-)