Installing Drupal

Hi, can someone tell me aproximately how long it will take me to set up a drupal site with ubercart if I have experience with drupal but not with ubercart. I will buy a theme and use it unmodified. How many hours about will the installation take ?

Upgraded from D6.20 to D7.0, install looked OK but the first thing I do is create a new image style and I get this error

PDOException: SQLSTATE[42S02]: Base table or view not found: 1146 Table 'tuneup_drupal7.image_effects' doesn't exist: SELECT image_effects.* FROM {image_effects} image_effects ORDER BY image_effects.weight ASC; Array ( ) in image_effects() (line 976 of /home/tuneup/public_html/drupal/modules/image/image.module).

I've been trying to install and create web sites with Drupal for two months now. Unsuccessfully.
I don't know where to put files. I tried an Acquia-Drupal installation, it worked for awhile, then one of my sites crashed and could not be recovered even from a backup (through Time Machine). Although I have a degree in Engineering Physics, I don't have much of a web background other than html and css. No unix, php, apache, or mysql.

When I read the documentation handbooks, I cannot understand them.
The presentations and answers to questions in the forums are obviously from programmers and computer science graduates. They are not intelligible to ordinary mortals, perhaps even immortals!

I would like to be able to use Drupal for 4 websites I need to build.

To my knowledge, there are five ways to install or work with Drupal. (on my Mac system, maybe PC also)
1. On the local system using the supplied php/apache/mysql set up that comes with Mac OS 10.6.6. By turning on web sharing in preferences. But how to manage it is a mystery. Where to put files, how to create databases and back them up. How to link all the appropriate files together, especially if I move the site folder, etc. I don't know how to do any of that.

It seems at least some people have successfully installed Drupal on OS X Server, but I've been unable to find much of any info on that (other than the usual missing and/or outdated MySQL, outdated PHP and/or missing GD) and so far nothing substantive for OS X Leopard Server.

Can anyone tell me (1) whether you can install Drupal on OS X Server 10.5 without compromising the server and (2) if yes, where I might find additional documentation on this? I infer there are at least a number of things I'd have to do via terminal to get Drupal running properly.

All I need to start my website is a way to create a link in the navigation that points users to see their past posts or a shortcut in the my account, or any other method. I've been searching all over and there is no straight up answer. Can someone please tell me how to get this feature working. Thanks.

I have two sites running one a local server which PDO was installed 2 months ago.
This error has appeared after one site had been up for 2 months and the other one for 1 week.
"Fatal error: Class 'PDO' not found in /home1/chemainu/public_html/includes/database/database.inc on line 185"
This error did not occur at the time when I was actively doing anything on the sites.
My web hosting say that the PDO is installed.
I can download these site and put them back on my local testing server (Aquia Drupal Control) with no problems.