Strange - "Create admin account" during site administration fails

After installing Drupal5.2 (along with Apache 2.2, PHP5.x and mySQL5.x), i tried creating an admin account by clicking on "Create 1st user account" link (http://localhost/drupal-5.2/?q=user/register) on the Welcome page.

Instead of the "Admin username/password registration" page, the link shows me the file system under drupal-5.2 (Index of /drupal-5.2)., The Apache error logs read as below ..

Please help - i'm cant proceed unless i fix this, and i'm not sure how to correct .htaccess

thanks
Kiran

[Tue Sep 25 22:56:23 2007] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] client denied by server configuration: C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/htdocs/drupal-5.2/.htaccess, referer: http://localhost/drupal-5.2/index.php
[Tue Sep 25 23:01:27 2007] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] client denied by server configuration: C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/htdocs/drupal-5.2/.htaccess, referer: http://localhost/drupal-5.2/index.php
[Tue Sep 25 23:06:59 2007] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] client denied by server configuration: C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/htdocs/drupal-5.2/.htaccess, referer: http://localhost/drupal-5.2/index.php
[Tue Sep 25 23:07:40 2007] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] client denied by server configuration: C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/htdocs/drupal-5.2/.htaccess, referer: http://localhost/drupal-5.2/index.php
[Tue Sep 25 23:07:53 2007] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] client denied by server configuration: C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/htdocs/drupal-5.2/.htaccess, referer: http://localhost/drupal-5.2/index.php