Installing Drupal

Had a nasty virus into my computer, cleaned up but lost my Drupal web site ( hosted on my browser) have drupal stack..
Bitnami service stack , unable to pull up.. If I have to uninstall and rebuild OK as in a steep learning curve.

Trying to install Drupal 7.14 on RHEL with Apache 2.4.2 and PHP 5.3.14, but keep getting the error:
PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function json_encode().... includes/common.inc on line 4898

Running phpinfo from the command line and through http request provides different results. On the command line it works and I see that it is using json version 1.2.1. Running it through the browser does not show json as being enabled. The configure command parameters between the two appear to match up.

Any suggestions?

I am using a local installation of Drupal 7 using Acquia Dev Desktop, my PC is very new with 8GB DDR3 RAM, Quad-Core 4.6GHz Intel i5, yadda yadda... but when running Acquia Drupal 7 loading the Configuration page takes at least 45 seconds!! Everything is so sluggish... What is the problem here and how do I speed it up? I'm just about to pull out my hair...

I have installed drupal 7.14 on a local machine which is running behind proxy server of the organization. Can someone guide me to get drupal going if I am behind proxy server. I am not able to install any new module etc. Pl. also guide me how to apply to patches if there is any need to update a patch. I do not have any idea of applying any patch hence I need this on priority as I am unable to go further developing my site.

I am trying to setup Drupal with IIS 7.5, SQL Server 2008 and Drupal 7.14.
I have setup IIS, PHP and other requirements as per instructions.
I have setup the SQL Server PDO driver and modified that in the php.ini.

When I go to install Drupal by going to the install.php the first time the setup ended with just an empty screen, not error no confirmation just an empty blank screen. I tried to redo the install and then I got the "Table variable already exists" error. So I deleted all the tables in the database and tried again and I still get the same error.

I would like to start out first and foremost by apologizing if this is in the wrong section; it's quite hard to find one that fits. I've spent a lot of time on Google and reading other users threads, but to no avail.

About the server/site:
My website is "dcoverdrive.com" and it's hosted at bluehost.com, which is one of the recommended Drupal hosts. I purchased a dedicated IP, and I'm running Drupal 7.14.

I purchased a SSL from Godaddy and have it all set up on the website. (You may visit "https://www.dcoverdrive.com" to see.)

Issue 1:
When I go to register a new account on the website (which you may try for yourself -- dcoverdrive.com), it gives me an error message "Error: Unable to send e-mail. Contact the site administrator if the problem persists."
I really thought I had everything set up correctly, and I've done my best to go back through and check it all. I have it set so no email verification is set up, as having a valid email isn't really that important to me or the client. (I wouldn't mind making them have a valid email, but I disabled it in the hopes that this message would disappear. On top of that, it's merely a small shop, so it's more of a nuisance for customers than anything to require verification.)