Hey,
If your looking for a fast & easy XOOPS setup, then you have to check out EasyPHP. I have trid all the others suggested within the forums here, and I like this one much better. Hope you do also...

http://www.easyphp.org/
or download links:
http://www.easyphp.org/telechargements.php3

It is clearly intended for developemental purposes, but it very nice software.

If however you figure out how to publish a live site using this, please let me know how you did it. Also any info you did to attempt to make it secure as well. Their FAQ attempts to tell you how to do this, but I have not got mine to work outside my local LAN. My current site I'm woriking on is http://www.pcdoctorservices.org and if you look at it, you will see what I mean. You can't view my pages correctly outside my network. Yet!

Hope you guys like this software. I sure do...