This appears to be windows 2000. Can do any operations through tsql, such as
creating a table.

Can you try this for me

create database fulltextest
GO
use fulltextest
GO
sp_fulltext_database 'enable'
GO
create table fulltext
(pk int not null identity constraint pk primary key,
charcol char (20))
GO
sp_fulltext_catalog 'test','create'
GO
sp_fulltext_table 'fulltext', 'create', 'test','pk'
GO
sp_fulltext_column 'fulltext','charcol','add'
GO
sp_fulltext_table 'fulltext','start_full'
GO