OK, it's been rebooted several times with no problems on the new disk. Teach me to ever use an rma returned drive for boot, "refurbished" seems to rarely stay working :(
Thank you everyone for all the help. The final restore I followed the screenshots in this article to the t (thought I was earlier, but printed them out and made sure) and it booted fine.
I seriously hope norton cleans their stuff up in the future to make cloning and restoring work without so many issues. I'm no windows admin, but am at least rather tech savvy in general, a complete novice would, well, probably have the same problems.
Thanks again for all the help!