Installing Drupal

I am working on a site to manage a writing contest. I used Drupal to build a prototype, and am now working out some of the details. Contestants will be required to submit a series of essays, with monthly deadlines. Ideally, the contest managers would like for the contestants to be able to work on drafts of their submissions online, i.e., enter/edit content that is only visible to the author until it is officially submitted.

I get this error:
Notice: unserialize(): Error at offset 0 of 4 bytes in c:\serveri\easyphp1-7\www\includes\common.inc on line 204

And when I try to access anything to do with administration (administer content etc) drupal kind of "forgets" my theme. Don't know how to explain this. It just prints everything in text format etc.

Hi - if you'll look at my website (http://view.rit.edu), you'll notice that the hlink in the navigation block is different than the hlink across the website. I'm using a modified Trip theme. Where do I fix the hlink for the nav block?

Thanks!

Is there a way to do that? I'd rather not bother anonymous users with anything unnecessary (i.e. cookies).

like home forum news.....

where should i do, drupal is very strage ,not like xoops,not like the webmaster said like xoops,:)

I'm running 4.3.0 after playing with previous version for a month and reading the mailing lists for several weeks. Works great except taxonomy is broken. If I click a category, I get things that should not be in that category. I click edit post to make sure it is categorized correctly and it is. Searched here, found no one with the same issue. Any one have any ideas?

(Using mySQL as I have found postgreSQL doesn't work in many ways)