John,
Did you initially setup Moodle as a standalone or is it part of a home network? How are you accessing the configuration from the "server" or another workstation on your network? Did you assign a Moodle URL of "localhost", IP number or a web address? Finally, what browser?
I have Moodle running on a server on my home network with a hole through my router to the outside world so the server has a registered DynDNS host name in my configuration. When I'm on a workstation on the internal network accessing Moodle Administration, the configuration pages will just sometimes hang when using IE. I figure it's one of those typical Microsoft "excellence in coding" issues cause everything displays fine with Firefox on my internal network.
As mentioned by Howard, can you give us more details on the error or what happens/doesn't happen.
Cheers,
Bob