Installing Drupal

Drupal is installed locally on apache with mysql on win XP.
In Russian texts some letters shown as question-marks.
When previewing a text it looks OK, but after submitting the problem appears. The problem seems to be localized in DB or its connection. The default encoding for tables is set to utf8.

I have installed the most current versions of both G2 and Drupal and I have read many of the posts about common issues. However, I am getting an error when clicking on the random photo block. It redirects me to an "error 500: Internal Server Error" - www.spartyon.org.

Any ideas?

Thanks!
Ed

I have troubles in installation, I looking forward to add different modules and features but still in the installation stage.

My question is: I can see the plain text Drupal default page without GUI, I click some links (eg create first account, admin section.....) it will just loop back to the plain default page. If I login, input name and password, then I got
Not Found
The requested URL http:// was not found on this server.

I've just set up a new drupal site and I started seeing a lot of "access denied" messages in the logs, for pages like /?q=admin.

When I created a "regular user" account so I could see what other users saw, I discovered that all users could see the "referrers", "top pages", "top users" and "recent hits" menu items.

I removed the menu items by disabling them entirely - but that means that *I* can't use them either.

Can someone explain to me what's up with these menu items?

I'm a complete noob to this, so bear with me. I'm trying to get Drupal up and running on my site, but I keep getting a "Can't connect to localhost" when I try to set-up my first account. I searched the forums and tried what I found, but it doesn't help. Sounds like the $base_url = 'http://localhost/drupal'; line of code is wrong. I followed the Drupal handbooks for installing it using cPanel, I think I did everything right. But there is no mention of changing the base URL. I installed the drupal folder in my public_html folder.

When i try to configure options in the administor menu i get the following errors in places;

Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in
/mnt/storage/users/b/3/o/b3online/home/modules/user.module on line 1293

and

Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in
/mnt/storage/users/b/3/o/b3online/home/modules/system.module on line 649

are just two examples. I need a fix asap.
Ben McRedmond