Hey Neil,
Kind of same thing on my end. I had to bring in a colleague that had more experience with server database management, he did a very thorough manual deleting of old database traces, and then I was able to get a working new install. It is frustrating that ARAS does not remove these traces in its included uninstall, and I still don't know what really went wrong on the first once, nor do I know what specific part of the old installs were causing the issue.
All I can say to people reading this from Google is - do a very thorough removal of old databases through a SQL server manager. This seemed to work for me.
Thank you for sharing this. Seems we found a solution! :)
