I tried the suggestion of redoing registry perm's, with no joy. However, in so doing, I found that the command resulted in a couple of strange error messages, so I ended up doing two things. 1) Blew the system away again, which since it was a new config, wasn't as painful as it could've been, and 2) used the installer executable distributed after the recent bru-ha-ha with the auto update causing issues [ http://forums.eeye.com/forums/p/798/3406.aspx ].
This seemed to work well, and allowed for the vulnerability assessment to complete. I'm all ears for any other suggestions, and will post again if the autoupdate to the current versions of all of Blink Personal's components causes the same issue afterwards.