Vista - HELP! Can't get localhost to work!

After using Windows 2000 for several years, I recently purchased a laptop
with Vista Home Premium installed. Since I do some simple web development on
a couple of sites I have (I use Macromedia Homesite to write the code), I set
up IIS. In Windows 2000 I used the PWS interface, which was delightfully
simple. Since Vista doesn't seem to have any equivalent to PWS, at least as
far as I can see, I'm struggling to find my way through IIS itself.

After setting up a default web directory in IIS, I tried to access it through
localhost, but got an error message (Error 500) with a long explanation of
possible
problems. The most likely seemed to relate to either authentication or
something in the congiguration of IIS, but I was still not able to get
localhost to access the directory. I just want to set up the web site on my
computer for local access from my computer for development purposes, and will
then FTP them to the host. Any suggestions on what I need to do to use
localhost successfully, as well as how to make sense of and simplify IIS for
my basic purposes, would be appreciated.

--
Larry S