Most folks here are not paid for their time and effort to support moodle; if this was a paid-for application with professional staff, I would consider your comments and concerns to be valid.
Many of those here run Moodle on a dedicated server, on a variety of operating systems - so a good portion would not even know where to start assisting you with troubleshooting this problem.
Where I work, we use Virtualbox to create a 'container' for a virtualized (aka appliance, VM, virtual PC, PC image ) edition of Moodle. This sounds complex, but is in fact much easier than a scratch install into your desktop PC. The virtual image is fully self-contained with operating system, web server (ie Apache) and moodle ready to run without having to configure. If you break something, all you have to do is delete the Virtual image and start over.
STEPS
Download & install Virtualbox :
(http://www.virtualbox.og)
Download Moodle appliance (virtual image):
Bitnami: http://bitnami.com/stack/moodle/virtual-machine
Turnkey: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/moodle
Create new VM container and use one of those images (there are many easy to follow guides for doing this - much easier than a from-scratch Moodle install)
Before you do anything else, CLONE the virtual machine (appliance/image/etc) and work with the copy version. When you break it, just delete clone and start with new clone. Another advantage to using a VM is that the host software allows you to make snapshots, so you can roll-back any changes when mistakes are made.
There is a HUGE amount of time you will have to invest in learning Moodle, but with skipping the whole installation routine, you can focus on Moodle itself.
Cheers
Ken
