Installing Drupal

HI Everyone,

I have just added a new site and I was trying to install Drupal. I had initially installed it fine however when I tried to install the Elements theme, it kept crashing and I had to uninstall Drupal. When I tried to re install it I kept getting the following error

We have a profile set up for artists on our site that includes information about them, images, etc. It was prepared for a specific show that they submitted to for jurying . We now have a second show in the works, where we created a second profile for the same purpose. We have several artists who were told they wouldn't need to complete a new profile (we told the rest they'd have to) and now are trying to figure out a way to copy the information over.

I am a Perl/Java guy, so I don't know where to look for PHP problems, but I was able to get Commerce Kickstart to install on a NetworkSolutions platform (something that was supposed to be difficult).

Receiving the following error message during the install of Drupal 7.20;

Notice: Undefined variable: finished in _batch_process() (line 344 of C:\Drupal\www\site\includes\batch.inc).

I receive this error during the Install Profile section of the installer when the installation is at 100%

Server 2008R2
Apache 2.2.22
PHP 5.3.9
MySQL 5.6.12

Looking for any input on trying my hand at setting up a linode and Nginx. Any compatibility or usabilty issues for Drupal 7. Is there significant speed advantage or disadvantage. Thanks for any insight.

OK...let me start by saying I am not a designer, I manage the team so I am not technical and know little about Drupal, but we're having challenges so I thought I would go to the community. As I get responses, I will likely engage the team for the technical...so thank you in advance for your patience.

We will be hosting a site with Pantheon, but the team tells me development is more efficent if done locally rather than on the dev server provided by Pantheon. The network latency and process to push code is time consuming regardless of how small a change. So, we are trying to implement a local development environment from which all development can be done and once complete moved to Pantheon through their dev/stage/prodcution environments...local development and a single push through the Panteon publishing process should make the team more efficent.

That said, the team is having trouble setting up the local environment and then being able to move the code. They tell me they have tried the following tools with the following results, any assistance to help resolve the issues below or achieve the goal identified above would be most appreciated.

• Acquia Dev Desktop: "the file structure is still messed and the pathing to Files is incorrect. This makes it impossible to easily transition from the local environment to a hosted dev server."