Okay, worked on it some more, and still, having the same trouble, some more info:
currently running windows 2000 and w3t 5.1.5 Perl, i downloaded the 5.2-5.3, mady a copy of my current version, and ran it, did a dump to a file, then restored the original on my server, and uploaded the w3t.dump over to the other server, where i've installed 5.3PHP version, works well and fine when i just use createtable and start from scratch, but i'm moving my users and stuff over, and need to import the databases. i've tried even using -f in mysql to force it to overwrite existing keys or whatever, but i'm still having no luck.. :o(