Installing Drupal

I'm installing the Banner module on my 4.6 site.
All seems well except that I can't access admin/settings/banner.
I get the following:

Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in /home/graham/sites/default/modules/banner.module on line 35

It's probably a simple issue, like file permissions, but I can't resolve it. Please help!

Regards
Graham

I have my own server (Mac OS X Server, i'm on it now it's my main machine).

i have been unable to use drupal because:

to get drupal to do clean urls you must have the htaccess file installed (right?).

i also need to have webdav turned on my site so i can run a small php program called php iCalendar, this is a quite simple program that works right out of the download, all i need to do is point my iCal app to it and turn Webdav on for it.

Does anyone have a suggestion on troubleshooting a permission denied to the admin user? I get it from GoJoinGo when submitting gjg_event. Is there code I can add or look at to determine permissions?

The installation of Drupal at first wasn't as difficcult as I thought it would be but now after configuring my database and getting the 1st page to create the admin account I am asked for an email address to send the new user info. I am developing my sandbox drupal site in a localhost using xampp 1.5.1 and do not have an email server here. I also tried loging in with the generated password Drupal gave me but if I try to change it in the 'user account' I get this error message:

I can't add any new custom block and if I do the following 2 errors are displayed. I can still ad the default blocks supplied with modules.
This problem only appears afer using Drupal for a few days. After the first installation it seem to work fine and I can add my own block.

user error: Duplicate entry '' for key 3
query: INSERT INTO boxes (title, body, info, format) VALUES ('Test block title', 'Test block body', '', 1) in /home/gossip/public_html/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66.

I'm new to all of this and am totally lost with the drupal intallation routine.
I have a web-host offering MySQL 5.0.
Using the myphpAdmin 2.6.4-pl3 interface.

It let me create one database via a routine within my host's website. It then lets me edit the database with the myAdmin interface, where I tried the commands to upload drupal and work out the admin rights. I did this in the MySQL Query box, which was obviously wrong - all commands generated synthax errors (used cut-n-paste).