Install to localhost

WOW! Thanks everyone for all of the information and things to try. I really appreciate it! Lots of stuff for me to look into and try out now (good and bad for me!).

A couple of points with some initial things I looked further into:
- I turned on all of the logging as suggested but still nothing. But, I did write a bad php file and ran it and it registered errors. Makes me think I must not have codeigniter set up right??
- Which leads me to the suggestion of setting up my own CI just to make sure I can get it working okay, and understanding more.
- I've tried a few - lamp, wamp, or whatever their names were with no luck. I may try out Xammp too then. Right now running wampserver.
- When starting up the server I do get this error:
"PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library 'C:\\Program Files (x86)\\php\\ext\\php_mssql.dll' - %1 is not a valid Win32 application.\r\n in Unknown on line 0" Not sure what that is about, and may be a big problem, or not, but it seems to reference mssql! Something else I need to look into...

So, I've got some work cut out for me to see if I can get things rolling. Thanks again for all of the suggestions.