First time login goes to 'access denied' screen if cookies disabled

I was attempting a fresh install of Drupal 5.0-beta2.
Everything worked fine untill I came to set up the first account user1.
This resulted in an access denied page. The log also showed that there was failure in sending the welcoming email. I don't know if this was related though but whole thing has been resolved by enabling cookies. Emails for subsequent new users now work too.

My set up details are:
Firefox 2
apache2triad
Installation on local host machine as a test site.
This was with a new database.
Before realising I had to enable cookies I tried deleting may database and reinstalling the Drupal download into htdocs.
I got the clue about enabling cookies from this node; http://drupal.org/node/6696

Hope this is of assistance. This is my first post to Drupal. Planning to launch my first project early in 2007.