Ok admitedly I'm very inexperienced and new at develpment.  (years ago compliable basic)  I've been pooring over .net for about a month now.  I was told dotnetnuke was a good way to go... ok thats me so talk down to me please.  if possible...   I have on my machine vs 2005 version 8.0.50 etc     using .Net version 2.0.50etc.  It tried to use dotnetnuke 4.X starter    vs content installer opened up and loaded 5 files not 4 as in documentation.  I opened vs 2005 went to new project and found no template for dotnetnuke.  I checked the content installer (wich I found with my back up files???) and checked the files to see if they were downloaded.  They had been but the were zipped.???  So I figured I'd unzip them.. two were very large with a lot of content and the other looked fine..  closed everythiing out and retried.. still no dotnetnuke template.  Then I found this note in documentation.  

As has been discussed in many of the ASP.NET related forums, .NET 2 (and Visual
Studio 2005) introduced a different paradigm for developing and running websites. The
main issue that we had to address is that there no longer is a web-project in
.NET2/Visual Studio 2005. Instead, .NET 2 treats all files that are contained under a
website’s Virtual Directory as part of the website.

Well thats not me for some reason I use those and have that... or better said I have both new websites or new projects to choose from.. so I'm not sure what to do next.  Any help will be appreciated...  Dave

Buy  the way I'm using Window xp-home but have a new computer with xp-pro and vista ultima comming soon. 

Ok that was very helpful.. I went into New VB application web and found the template    but it couldn't load but I noticed that it was treating it as a website so I went back to new website and found the template and I'm up and running..... so far... thanks so much Jeff...