Well, I finally got it working. I was poking around in, what I assume, are the install logs (IMHO, this could use a mention in the install guide....are there logs generated, where are they?).

Found an error where a SQL statement failed over and over and over ('SCOPE_IDENTITY' is not a recognized function name).

I googled that error, and found out that I could run

SELECT @@VERSION

to find out what version of SQL server I was running. Well, it turns out that I had 2 version on my machine (MSDE 7 and SQL 2000). So, I uninstalled both and reinstalled SQL 2000. Everything worked great after that.

Out of this, I have two suggestions:
1) If there are errors in the installer, don't tell people that they can access their portal. Display some error message that could point them in the right direction (the first time I went through the install, I thought it was successfull).
2) Update the install documentation to tell a)if there are logs generated during the install process and b)if they are generated, where they are.

Unfortunately, I know little about SQL server and even less about .Net (Most of my programming is done in PHP or Python using MYSql). However, at work, we are a MS shop, so I have to figure it out a little bit.

Do you have the right version of the .Net framework (I was initially using 2.0 beta)?
Have you verified your Virtual Directory setup?
Did you try using your actual machine name in the web.config file?