Thanks very much for your excellant and very detailed tutorial. It does match the procedure that I followed. And I did get "green lights" and successful confirmations the entire way. And I do see the database and tables in phpmyadmin. I DID NOT, however, manually change any permissions, since the install screens where telling me that all was OK... and since I do see my data in mainfile.php, suggesting that write permissions are correct. I am not familiar with IUSR permissions so I'm not sure if I have the ability to alter them. What I do have are permission for "Built-In User" and for "Anonymous". The choices for each are None, Read, Change and Full Access.

Yes, I can get to the database via phpmyadmin, so if someone has something I could try there, I'd appreciate hearing.

Here are some new clues....

I wanted to check to see if the blank page represented a php error which might cause the php to die, or if the page was executing fine but was just not coming up with anything to put on the screen. To test this, I added:
echo "this page is OK"; to index.php... and my blank page now came up saying "this page is ok". So index.php seemed to be a happy page. Noting that index.php has a call to mainfile.php, I added the same echo statement to that file... and again, the text printed to the screen. My admin.php file comes up blank, too, so I added the echo statement to that one, and also to the included file called cp_functions.php... and again, my test text printed to the screen.

One additional clue... I repeated the installation process and noted one quirky thing at the very end. It said:

Your site
Click HERE to see the home page of your site.

Way to use
[not yet]

Support
Visit XOOPS.org

Why does it say "Way to use [not yet]"? Is that normal behavior or is that telling me something?

Thanks very much for the reply. I uploaded xoops_md5.php and it's companion file, and ran it... and indeed, it came back and said that common.php was invalid. I re-uploaded common.php... but the site still comes up blank. Does the install process write configuration data to common.php? Am I in trouble now for having uploaded a clean version of common.php?

Referring to your suggestion about hitting Control-A... my page comes up totally blank. View Source (and Control-A) display nothing.

XOOPS Version: 2.0.15
Module Name/Version: ?
PHP Version: 4.3.2
MySQL Version: 3.23.49
Web Server Software (Apache/IIS/Other): IIS
Operating System: Windows
Theme you are using: Default
Custom template: (Yes/No) No
PHP Debug Messages: blank page, even when error messages are turned on
MySQL Debug Messages: none
Smarty Debug Messages: none
A full description of the issue:

It's the dreaded blank page. This is a brand new install. The install process went without a hitch, with all green lights from start to finish. Using phpmyadmin, it is confirmed that the database does exist and does contain 31 XOOPS tables. But the very first time one views the site at index.php, a blank page appears. Also, a blank page at admin.php. I have issued the debug query with "UPDATE xoops_config SET conf_value=1 WHERE conf_name = 'debug_mode'", but no errors appear. I have edited include/common.php to change "error_reporting(0);" to "error_reporting(E_ALL);", but no errors appear. What else can I try?