[rescue] Newbie question about IBM P5s (AIX)

[Clemson, Chris]

Hi everyone.
We've just bought a IBM p5 510 with AIX already installed, and I'm stuck
at the first hurdle.
I have a console cable plugged in (nicked from a sun) which seems to
work - pressing "1" to set the main console and using arrow keys in the
menu work.
However, going through the menus about date and time, root password etc
(AIX is already installed), on my hyperterminal vt100 client, pressing
esc-0 (which should enter the changed values) just seems to quit the
menu system completely and then my console just sits there doing
nothing.
Has anyone had experience with setting these up, or can someone point me
to a newbie guide?
I've got the aix manuals on cd, but the documentation program seems
buggy and a lot of links to pdfs are broken (this could be due to the
program not using a proxy, but there's nothing I can find to check
this).
I've tried the ibm documentation sites, but there's so much on there
it's difficult to know what to search for.
Thanks!

Chris