Installing Drupal

After a few agonizing days, I finally managed to run the install script (locally, on Windows) without errors/warnings (except the final email can't be sent). Ended up logged in to the index page: "Welcome to your new Drupal website!".

Every link in the menu leads to the root file listing. Something was obviously not installed.

Using:
Apache 2.2.16
PHP 5.2.14
MySQL 5.1
Drupal 6.19

I have read the handbook and several other articles and have been unsuccessfully working on this all week and now I might have ruined it totally.
My local environment is Windows 7, XAMPP 1.7.3, phpMyAdmin 3.2.4, Apache 2.2.14, MySql 5.1.41 and PHP 5.3.1 and the server is phpMyAdmin 3.2.4, Apache 2.2.16, MySql 5.0.91 and PHP 5.2.14.
Recently I uploaded another site from my local machine to the server and that went ok.
However I have not been unable to reverse the situation from another site.
I can bring the site up on the local machine with a few image directory problems, which I could probably solve if I could log in to the site, but I cannot log in either driectly or via /?q=user.
I have turned off clean urls, disabled captcha, backed up the database directly via phpMyAdmin and also using Backup and Migrate (module) with mostly similar results.
Now I have made things worse as I can no longer log into phpMyAdmin.
I noted that user root had no password and this was a security risk so I followed the instructions to change the password:
"If you want to set a password for MySQL access, please use of MySQL Admin.
To set the passwort "secret" for the user "root", type the following:

\xampp\mysql\bin\mysqladmin.exe -u root -psecret

I am brand new. New to all of this. I know not cool, but I really wanted to do this and I am learning as I go. I will give you order of ops, and hope someone can help me.
1) Download Drupal 6.19
2)Upload Files of Drupal 6.19
3) Go to Drupal.org and choose community building package-which ends up downloading Drupal 6.15
4) I have a MAC so using classicFTP to upload Drupal 6.15 which my friend the "web designer" told me to
5) Setting up site through my URL and it freezes at the site set up for admin and et al.

During second step of drupal install i entered database details but as i save the details i am getting the following message
The mysqli error was: The database type 'mysqli' is unsupported. Please use either 'mysql' or 'mysqli' for MySQL, or 'pgsql' for PostgreSQL databases..
My mysql client and server version is 5.0.19.I also searched the internet but no constructive reply was found.Any help would very gretatful...

Thanks,
Jijo

Hi,
I have installed apache solr server1.4.1, drupal 6.19 and configured Apache Solr in Drupal. The site has contacted the Apache Solr server, I have enabled apache solr search to be the default search and cron ran successfully.

But I receive the following errors when I click on "Apache Solr search index -> configuration files":

Hi
I have some updates to apply: 6.9 through 6.19.
Do I have to apply these in order or can I just apply 6.19?

Don;t Drupal do any auto update like Wordpress or do I have to download and apply updates manually to my folders?