Unable to get IIS to respond to localhost!

After being used to Windows 2000 for several years, I have recently purchased
a laptop with Vista Home Premium installed. Since I do some web development
on a couple of sites I have, 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, I'm struggling to find my way through IIS itself.

After setting up my default web directory, I tried to access it through
localhost, but got an error message with a long explanation of possible
problems. The most likely seemed to relate to authentication, but I was
still not able to get localhost to access the directory. I want to set up
my web sites only for local access from my computer for development purposes
(I use Macromedia Homesite to write the code). Any suggestions on what I
need to do to use localhost successfully, as well as how to make sense of and
simplify ISS for my very basic purposes, would be appreciated.
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Larry S