Installing and upgrading help

I have also been struggling with this issue for ... oh, a long time.  I would first get a FastCGI error (timeout) and then, upon refreshing my browser, get a "Could not find a top-level course!" error message.  FastCGI is set to time-out after only 70 seconds, I think I read somewhere, much, much too short for a giant install like Moodle.  It's normally set to this default to prevent waiting for a CGI foul-up that will never actually resolve on its own.  So ... I deleted all tables in my database using "PHPMyAdmin", available free for download.  I could have just deleted the database itself instead - either one would have done.  I then inserted "ActivityTimeout=600" (10 minutes) into the PHP section (bottom) of fcgiext.ini (without the ";" symbol) (found in the c:- windows- system32- inetsrv- folder).  This, I thought, should prevent a timeout.  Same results, but something new - I saw more database tables were created - many more than before - which suggested that it was actually still installing but got interrupted after 5 minutes.  According to some webs, Moodle 2.something setup should take about 15 minutes on some computers, so my thinking is that 20 minutes ought to do it.  I changed the "ActivityTimeout" setting to 1200 seconds (20 minutes).  I went back to the URL of the Moodle site and began installation again, building the database tables from scratch.  Guess what - SUCCESS.  My database was built, and FastCGI didn't time-out.  I hope this helps.  Good luck to everyone in the wonderful world of DIY websites.