You can be sure that we test our builds. A lot of people set up a lot of dnn sites on a daily basis. Having said that.. there are a few nacks.

Let me walk through the install procedure i always use, so you can see if you missed something:

1. Create a new database in SQL Server 2000 / 2005 (any variant will do, personaly i am using SQL server 2005 express), and create a user that has at least DBO rights on that database. Personally i just use an SA account, it saves me from creating new users for every install. NEVER DO THAT ON A LIVE INSTALLATION!
2. Download and unzip the install or source version of DNN (personally i always use the source version) on a good location on your harddrive, and create a new IIS virtual directory / application that points to the installation (if you downloaded the source version, point it to /website). You can name your application anything, but if you name it anything other than http://localhost/dotnetnuke_2, you will need to make some changes to the solution file
3. Make sure that the asp.net workerprocess identity has modify rights on the website dir and everything below. On xp, that user is ASPNET, on win2003/Vista, that user is NETWORK SERVICE. Personally, i just give everyone full rights on the top dir that holds all my dnn installs. AGAIN: NEVER DO THAT ON A LIVE INSTALLATION
4. Make the appropriate changes in the web.config file. If you downloaded the source version, you will have to rename release.config or development.config to web.config. The difference between those two files is that development.config defines both medium trust, and an objectQualifier for the database. PLEASE NOTE: the default connectionstrings in web.config point to a sql express user instance database, which resides in the App_Data folder of the application. Since you want to use your own defined database, you have to remove these definitions, and uncomment the other connectionstrings, and modify them to your needs. I am talking about multiple connection strings: please note that there are 2 definitions, the one in AppSettings is a legacy value to support "old" modules
5. Browse to your site. It should not be necessary to build the site first. Your site should run without errors now, and if you are going to build the site, it should build without errors too. (although,sometimes it is necessary to build twice in vs2005, as some projects are not available the first time around)

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Please read my post. It had not been working before I commented something out.