Okay, I'm not sure what the problem was. I deleted all files and tried again from scratch. It seems to work now, so all is well. Advice to anyone else would be to do the same, and pay particular attention to permissions, I guess.

What was the solution? I am having the same problem. All paths, etc. seem to work fine. My PHP/DB/Web all set up and work fine. I double-checked all paths and permissions, and they all seem to be in order.

Still, on the Save Configuration page of the installer I get the message "Could not copy the distribution file to mainfile.php/{blah}/xoops_data/data/secure.dist.php".

What's up with this? It's frustrating! First-time user of XOOPS.