If you're talking about restarting the setup wizard set in your /override/site.ini.append the CheckValidity from false to true.
If you deleted ez publish completely and reuploaded it and still got a login page, I would guess you didn't delete it completely. Also try to empty the ez publish cache in /var/cache/ and/or refresh the index.php in your browser.
Many thanks for your reply - I seem to have now got it sorted. I think the issue was dreamweaver was uploading cached version of the site... once I deleted it via the DM ftp client, copy/pasted original 'settings' folder, and uploaded that it went back to installation... not as refined as your solution though!
One other question - once you load, say, the plain template the only way of introducing another template (say news) is a reinstallation??
Obviously it'd be very convenient if you could pick and choose elements from the predefined templates - so now I have plain, and I'd like to introduce functionality from the news template.