Can you be a little more specific about what you are trying to do.

"Now I am trying to write xslt  from scratch, just 5-8 lines  to do an
identity transform  to see the form  of the data  returned by the W"

Nevertheless if you are simple looking for some XSLT that dumps out the XML of
your web  part, the following should do the trick.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes" />

<xsl:template match="/">
<xmp>
<xsl:copy-of select="*" />
</xmp>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

I tried EXACTLY what you specified, and get a plain while page  with
nothing on it. I also tried
changing the output mode to "xml" or "text", still nothing. It is behaving as
if the XSLT is not connected to the XML data  being returned  by the WP.

I know there is data because when I use
<xsl:variable name="Rows" select="/dsQueryResponse/Rows/Row"/>
<xsl:variable name="dvt_RowCount" select="count($Rows)" />

dvt_RowCount gives the total # of rows returned from the lists.

I'm not sure how you are getting the SharePoint data, but it looks
like you are receiving list items.

Here's a simple xslt  stylesheet that we've used to transform  the
results of an spQuery.

It's something specific to your web  part.
This is not SharePoint specific though.
e.g. data  Form Wep Part (DFWP) or Core Search Result web part will display  the
XML when you feed that XSLT.
As long as your data is coming from one site collection one option could be to
replace your web part with a DFWP in recursive mode. Another option could be to
use the search web service and use a DFWP to consume the results, but that would
require some configuration of managed properties in search configuration.

My problem, again, was that trying to use a simple identity transform  against
data from SP MOSS web  parts, I could not see the "raw xml" data, IE6.0 browser
showed only a white  page.

I had been doing all experiments with SPD, pasting between the <xsl> and
</xsl> tags. I still get failure, white page, when I do this.

However, when I open up the XSL pane in the SP UI, say for the DVWP, and
replace all of the xslt  with the EXACT simple identity transform that I use in
SPD, lo & behold, I get the raw xml data.

So, why does doing it through the UI work and not SPD?

Just wondering. When you see the white  page, did you look at the source code of
the white page? Maybe the XML you are expecting is already there. IE is clever
enough not to show raw xml at all, you need to create a boundary element
like <xmp></xmp> to make the XML show up.

I will be away skiing until ~2/17, cannot anwwer, cannot do
anymore experiments until ater then.